Maximizing shareholder value would be a fine goal for a corporate entity that had received no special deals from government. Like limited liability. Like corpor

Maximizing shareholder value would be a fine goal for a corporate entity that had received no special deals from government. Like limited liability. Like corporate personhood. Like infrastructure and other subsidies. Like tax preference. Like exemption from paying for broadly dispersed externalities via regulatory capture. Like government help to quash freedom of association - oops, I mean collective bargaining. Oh, but wait, that's not the kind of deal that's on offer, is it? IS IT? No, once you've formed a corporation you've made a contract with the government. I mean "contract" in the philosophical sense, not the legal one which has been quite deliberately defined to suit the very entities we're discussing. The contract is that you will receive these favors, in return for some social good or at least for not undermining the social good that already exists. Go read your history, on the early corporations chartered to build canals and such. Corporations should be held to that deal, or the contract should be considered broken and all the favors withdrawn. Why? Because honoring contracts is the most fundamental pillars of a real functioning market - the very market that laissez-fairists who push the "maximizing shareholder value" fallacy claim to revere. To say it's OK to break contracts is to say you don't believe in markets. If you don't have real markets and you don't have socialism all that's left is oligarchy. Oops. That's the part we're not supposed to figure out, isn't it? I see the downvote brigade has already shown up.