Ideology watch: the NYT on Milton Friedman, or how to whitewash the actual logic of capitalism

One of my sons called my attention to this New York Times essay purporting to commemorate and analyze a famous popular piece by Milton Friedman in which he suggested that businesses should have as their only objective what is, in fact, their only objective, namely, maximizing profit.  This can be their only objective on pain of extinction:  that is how capitalism actually works, as a German philosopher noticed in the 19th-century.  Friedman's error was to state openly the actual and entire raison d'etre of capitalism, something that the NYT, as the mouthpiece for the prudent wing of the ruling class, could not possibly commemorate without a full ideological whitewash.  Kurt Andersen, the author of the lead piece (linked above), is clueless (he did better work at Spy back in the 1980s!).   The NYT can't permit telling the truth about capitalism to occur without suitable moralizing illusions (including the new favorite one of the ruling class, "stakeholder capitalism"), and so it rounds up a bunch of them (and one or two outliers).