Understanding Free Market Economics Through Milton Friedman’s Lens
Release Date: 11/15/2025
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Monetarism and the doctrine of shareholder-value maximization pushed U.S. companies toward an extract-at-all-costs model, which offshored jobs, hollowed out the domestic workforce, expanded the labor pool at home, and steadily eroded people’s ability to earn a livable wage. This model treats the economy like an infinite reservoir rather than a closed system with limits, so each demand for “more value” becomes another round of resource extraction, social, economic, and environmental, much like a malignancy growing without regard for its host. Before the rise of shareholder primacy in the late 20th century, the free-market philosophy didn’t revolve around perpetual extraction. The shift has been devastating to employment, wages, manufacturing, communities, and the ecosystems that sustain them.
The embrace of shareholder primacy after the 1970s rewired corporate incentives around a single metric, ever-increasing returns to equity owners. In a closed economic system, where labor power, natural resources, and community wellbeing are finite, this kind of relentless extraction behaves like cancer: it prioritizes growth for its own sake even when that growth destroys the host environment. Friedman’s doctrine, that a firm’s chief social responsibility is to increase its profits, became the philosophical spark that justified decades of corporate behavior focused on cutting costs, offloading risk, and externalizing harm.
As corporations rushed to reduce labor costs, manufacturing offshoring accelerated dramatically. Empirical research finds that foreign sourcing by U.S. multinationals significantly contributed to domestic manufacturing job losses. Larger labor pools abroad, combined with weakened bargaining power at home, pushed down wages for non-college-educated workers in particular. Inside a closed system, where communities depend on stable jobs and economic roots, this extraction of livelihood behaves exactly like a tumor metastasizing: it draws nourishment from the body while weakening every structure required for long-term survival.
The consequences are visible in every de-industrialized region of the country. Wage stagnation, the decline of mid-skill jobs, and the erosion of worker power characterize the period following the rise of shareholder primacy. Productivity rose, but the income gains were siphoned upward rather than shared. In a healthy system, value circulates. In a cancerous one, value accumulates in one node at the expense of the organism. Vulture capitalism, leveraged buyouts, asset stripping, stock buybacks instead of workforce investment, thrives precisely because the shareholder-value doctrine rewards extraction, not regeneration.
Environmental damage completes the picture. A closed biosphere cannot sustain the unlimited externalization of pollution; yet, offshoring has relocated many of the most polluting industries to places with weaker environmental regulations. Research shows that a substantial portion of the “decline” in U.S. manufacturing emissions came not from cleaner technology but from relocating dirty production elsewhere. This is the ecological parallel to financial extraction: the pollution-haven effect ensures that damage continues, just out of sight. In biological terms, a malignancy doesn’t stop spreading just because you stop looking at it; it simply finds a new tissue to invade.
The Heritage Foundation adopts a strongly pro-shareholder-rights, anti-corporate "wokeness" stance, though it does not explicitly champion the excesses of shareholder-value maximization as practiced in many corporations. For example, in its report "ESG, DEI, and What to Do About Them," Heritage argues that corporations should “maximize their return on investment or minimize their risk," and that “non-pecuniary factors" (such as ESG considerations) may not be subordinated to pecuniary factors unless investors give informed consent.
Related
Capitalism and Exploitation: The Engine Beneath the System
https://cypressandstar.net/capitalism-and-exploitation-the-engine-beneath-the-system
Elite Theory and the Drift of Democracy
https://cypressandstar.net/elite-theory-and-the-drift-of-democracy
Wage Stagnation and the Purpose of the Corporation
https://cypressandstar.net/wage-stagnation-and-the-purpose-of-the-corporation
Sources
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