Friedman: A business is obligated to maximize shareholder value, nothing more.

Everyone else: That’s crazy! Profit maximizing businesses roll over all sorts of other stakeholders and fail to live up to basic ethical standards.

This relates to a complaint I’ve made before. Markets are good at generating prices that reflect aggregate views on the relative scarcity/importance of various goods. Markets aren’t good at charity. To roll other things in there means a good old fashioned price is now a price plus an obligation to do some moral calculus in how we each interact with the complex adaptive system that is the world economy. It’s a recipe for disaster.

So what do we do? We recognize the gap between a world where Friedman’s advice is reasonable and the world we live in, then we figure out how to close that gap. That Friedman’s doesn’t match our world says more about our world than it does about Friedman’s argument.

Rather than move Friedman’s starting point by trying to juggle competing demands of various stakeholders without markets, we should think about the legal framework these stakeholders are acting in.

If we refine our understanding of who has what rights to make what decisions we’ll see that the reason profit maximizers (and vote maximizers) sometimes do bad things is because it’s the best choice available to them. The answer isn’t to say “businesses lobby business therefore they shouldn’t respond to incentives!” it’s to say “therefore we should restrict opportunities to seek rents!”

Coase wasn’t trying to tell us that spillovers don’t matter. He was trying to tell us that transaction costs do matter and whenever they’re present, we need to be careful in allocating rights that have spillover effects. By the same token, we should think of Friedman’s advice as saying “in a perfect world, corporations should maximize profits, but the world needs work.”