The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits

Libertarians like Milton Friedman often believe that profit-maximizing markets are the morally best outcome.  Many libertarian organizations promote this idea and there even some heterodox journals, such as Markets and Morality, that are part of this effort.  Friedman also had opposite ideas that balanced out what he says here.  Some "hard core libertarians" accuse Friedman of being somewhat of a bleeding-heart liberal because Friedman also promoted things like government welfare for the poor in various forms like a negative income tax (which was implemented by Nixon in a weak form as the EITC, partly based on Friedman's ideas).  Milton Friedman wrote the following essay in 1970 and repeatedly promoted these ideas. For example, he reasserted them in 1995 in another libertarian publication.  

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits

...The businessmen believe that they are defending free enterprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism. Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.
...The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are not values, no "social" responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form. 
The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest--whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not.  Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity
appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political mechanism
altogether. 
But the doctrine of "social responsibility" taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collective doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a "fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business--to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud."