Your opening premise is dead-wrong: "For decades, the sole focus of the modern corporation has been maximizing value for shareholders. Their financial gain is the primary focus of the corporate capitalist system."

For starters, I've never understood how to recognize 'maximization'. How high is maximum.

More important in my view, the Jensen & Meckling (1976) piece has gotten bum-rap reactions like yours for many years. I can only conclude that your objections, like theirs, are rooted in politics, not in economics or in responsible management.

Shareholder value-maximization is a result, not a cause. It results from excelling in the performance of the myriad other tasks that any complex business faces every single day. When shareholder value is maximized, so is value to every other constituency--employers, customers, suppliers, and communities.

Those who support the notion of 'corporate social responsibility' fail to understand that the officers of a corporation are likely to make different choices--and, I would argue, self-serving ones, at that--from the choices that the owners of the company would make. Therefore, Left-leaning Democrat Warren Buffett's career-long practice of refusing to engage in CSR, but instead, to distribute those monies to his shareholders so that they can make better and more-local choices of causes and organizations to support has always struck me as the right one. And if anyone disagrees with that statement and cares to provide specifics, I'd appreciate knowing the names of companies that have a track record of value creation over nearly five decades that is comparable to what Buffett has achieved at Berkshire Hathaway.

In other words, show us evidence. I won't hold my breath waiting to see that.