“these trends will undermine the most important way businesses really do contribute to the common good. By pursuing shareholder value and maximizing profit, publicly traded companies facilitate choice in goods and services for consumers, provide wages and benefits to their employees, repay their loans to banks, and pay their taxes. They increase the total material wealth in society, allowing people who have never owned a share in their lives to realize goods ranging from health care to education.
Just as protectionism and industrial policy significantly compromise the workings of market exchange by using state power to privilege connected groups of businesses and political leaders, so too would a capacious, government-enforced vision of stakeholder capitalism. By blending politics and business, it would further shift the economy’s focus away from meeting the needs and wants of 330 million American consumers and toward promoting the interests of politically connected businesses.”