I have a reference. In his 1953's article "The business leader as a 'daimonic' figure", Fritz Redlich - who was one of the greatest economic historians and entrepreneurship scholars of the 1940s-1950s - called it the "irresponsibility of the businessman". He links it to the French laissez-faire tradition as old as Colbert and identifying Adam Smith's invisible hand and William Paley's natural theology. Let me copy paste a few excerpts:

"But in fact  this way of  thinking  must  have been much  older. As early as 1732 the thought be found expressed in an American sermon in which  the  preacher stated: 'A rich man is a great friend to the public while he aims at nothing but serving himself. God will have us live by helping one another, and since Love will not do it, Covetousness shall."

" In 1877, one hundred and fifty years after the above-quoted sermon, Samuel Tilden addressed a gathering of New York businessmen as follows: 'You are, doubtless in some degree, clinging to the illusion that you are working for yourselves, but it is my pleasure to claim that you are working for the public. While you are scheming for your own selfish ends, there is an overruling and wise Providence directing that the most of  all you do should inure to the benefit of the people. Men of colossal fortunes are in effect, if not in fact, trustees for the public."

"It goes without saying that if a man honestly believes in the harmony of the social universe, if he honestly believes that God will take care that public interest evolves from the prosecution of private interests, he must not only believe in laissez-faire, but also has no reason to feel social or national
responsibility for his actions"

So, if this is correct, the question is how the "irresponsibility of the business" or "Friedman doctrine" emerged from the general laissez-faire doctrines. The earliest reference Redlich used is from a book titled "The House of Morgan", by Lewis Corey, published in 1930, in page 20 - it's available in the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/houseofmorgansoc00core). What Redlich omitted was that the pastor who said that above was Rev. Joseph Morgan, of Puritan theology, an ancestor of J. P. Morgan (according to this biography, it might be better to compare with a recent one). The sermon was even called "The Nature of Riches", but there's no reference to its edition.

Em qui., 13 de jan. de 2022 às 18:04, Holden Fitzgerald <[log in to unmask]> escreveu: