I thought the goal of companies is to return value to shareholders, not necessarily add value to the economy. I don't mean to sound cynical, but it's a fair statement with regards to how things are today.
[1] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board_(Netherlands)#Hist...
The goal of the people who own these companies is to make money with it, or carry out whatever other purpose it has.
The goal of the government in providing a legal framework which allows these companies to exist as legal entities is to benefit society in some way.
If the latter isn’t working out then maybe it needs to be adjusted.
The economic notion of "value" -- the quantity the economy optimizes -- is weighted according to wealth. "Value creation," as referred to in economic circles, is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want. That really is the crux of it.
You can gauge its progress by looking at the wealth distribution. In a flat distribution, the economic notion of value coincides very closely with the colloquial notion of value. In a heavily skewed distribution, it doesn't correspond at all. Masses of starving poor people are of no concern to a system that assigns them 0 weight. Feeding them produces no value. In stark contrast, those with great weight can command the economy to devote great energy to highly counterproductive tasks such as consolidating and perpetuating their own power. This is an intrinsic problem of skewed distributions -- and the reason why "who's goals" is exactly the right question to ask.
Of course, you can't hammer the wealth distribution completely flat without eliminating the economy's ability to incentivize, because being on the advantaged side of an uneven distribution is the reward. You have to strike a balance. That shouldn't be controversial, but on account of the great energies mentioned above, it is.
By confusing the two notions of value, one can make the argument that you just did, and with that one subtle alteration the tendency of the system to run away is hidden. Note that the system you described could be obtained from the system I described by pressing a "reset" button and hammering the wealth distribution flat between each transaction. I'm sure that wasn't your intent, but it's a dramatic demonstration of how attaching the word "value" to the economic concept of wealth-weighted-value hides the problem from view.
The economic notion is basically saying a mass of poor people have no value to anybody else if they're not able to do anything anybody else wants or each other want enough to pay for.
But it is, I think, fair to note that corporations are not responsible for making sure the rules under which they function work for everyone. That particular failure belongs to government, or in the alternative, all of us for allowing such a shitty government.
Because corporations as they exist are completely fictional, you bet your ass we can take those completely made up protections away from them once they stop being a net benefit to society.
If that were done, corporations would do an absolute shit job of returning value to shareholders.
Unfortunately, reality is a bit more complex than that.
However, economists have made big progress coming to grips with that complexity, and many proponents of small government and laissez-faire are actually acolytes of what James Kwack calls "Economism" [2], an adherence to Economics 101 that's simultaneously dogmatic, hugely selective, and pro business & anti regulation.
"Real" economists (including the frequently maligned "The Economist" magazine) are quite in favour of sensible regulation, government intervention, and progressive policies, more so than corporate lackeys and the Republican caricature of conservatism.
Lastly, that shareholder value maximisation should be the only goal of companies is a sensible result, yes, but only for a specific and narrow theoretical question (the principal-agent problem, embedded in a neoclassical framework). What the actual goal of actual corporations in the real world should be is up to us (subject to real world constraints, obviously).
When you see one without the other it indicates that the system is not functioning properly.
What we are seeing is this may not always be the case.
I think the less pro-capitalist portion of America is mostly aligned with viewing companies as being driven by profit, with varying amounts of support - judging, indifferent, endorsing - for their pursuit of profit depending on where that individual falls on the spectrum. The economic and political situation is getting pretty dire IMO.