Those who would be our elected leaders get lots of attention from public and press. As they should.

But some unelected people have had outsized effect, too, often out of sight and negative.

Two with negative legacies are Robert Moses, who built New York’s highway and park systems, and Milton Friedman, who gave corporations carte blanche to abandon social goals. Their ideas and actions have had wide-ranging and negative effects nationwide.

In both cases, they were performing on the biggest stages, New York City and an elite college, so their ideas percolated down to the rest of us.

Moses first. Author Robert Caro wrote in the 1974 biography “The Power Broker” that Moses was the most powerful unelected official in America. Moses began humbly as a New York City technocrat but was off and running in 1924, when New York Gov. Al Smith picked him to head two state park commissions. In 1933, he took over New York City parks, too.

Before he was done, he had spent $27 billion building 700 miles of roads, 20,000 acres of parks, 658 playgrounds, seven bridges, United Nations headquarters, the Central Park zoo and Lincoln Center.

Impressive, yes, but at what cost? To New York and to the nation.

More than 500,000 people were evicted to make room for his roads, bridges and parks. That’s one of every 11 people in New York City (1920). To make it worse, he began in a decade when NYC’s population grew by 1.3 million, so you can imagine the housing crunch.

But Moses had a plan for that, too. High-rise tenements would replace walkup tenements that housed millions. Looking up at these public-housing stacks when I lived in Manhattan in the 1960s, I couldn’t help but envision crypts in a mausoleum. Warehousing low-income people in skyscrapers spread around the country, and the result was often disastrous. High-rise slums.

The ghosts of such ghastly housing projects as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago still haunt us. Only after 40 years did cities start low-rise, garden-style apartments.

Even Portland got caught up in the mania to destroy neighborhoods and replace them with roads or sterile housing projects. Ed Crockett, who grew up on Munjoy Hill, described in “The Ghosts of Walter Crockett” how the widening of Franklin Street in Portland to the Franklin Arterial split a historic neighborhood and evicted hundreds.

Only in the past 40 years have planners and engineers realized that building more roads and bridges in urban areas simply draws more cars, at the cost of pollution, time lost, frayed nerves.

Fortunately, that realization came soon enough to prevent Interstate 295 from replacing Commercial Street in Portland or Interstate 40 from bisecting the grounds of Graceland in Memphis. And, this week, Portland started studying whether to restore Franklin Street.

The Guardian, in an article in 2014, lamented that Moses “simply couldn’t comprehend a future in which mass transit, bicycles or walking might play a central role.” Now, cities such as Kansas City, Los Angeles and Minneapolis, which abandoned public transit, are starting new systems.

Now to Friedman, an economist at the University of Chicago, home to 100 Nobel Prize winners, including him. In the academia, the fast path to fame is to challenge prevailing theories. So, Friedman single-mindedly pushed the idea that corporations exist only to maximize profits.

Between 1962 and 1970, Friedman moved from writing that “Corporations have no higher purpose than maximizing profits” to arguing the corporations have no other purpose than maximizing profits. “No higher” vs. “no other” is a huge difference.

In a long apologia on Sept. 13, 1970 in The New York Times, he wrote, business “cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in (a) vague sense.” It’s OK for people to be socially responsible, to hire the disadvantaged, to donate to a little league team, to hold benefits for people hit by disaster. But not for corporations. Pursuit of anything other than profit is a sin.

I recall the economic doldrums of the 1980s. Stock market values rose every day that yet another corporation announced thousands of layoffs. I shook my head at the idea that corporations had no responsibility to their employees, let alone to their host municipalities.

Friedman’s profit-uber-alles mantra led to treating workers as liabilities rather than assets. That attitude persists today in large companies. No wonder so many working people are disenchanted.

Recall 2012, when Mitt Romney took flak for saying, “Corporations are people.” I recall from jurisprudence class that the U.S. Supreme Court, in fact, did rule that corporations are people. In 1886, it held that corporations are covered by the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment but aren’t citizens. The logic is twisted. A left sock has no value without a right sock.

So long as corporations are officially people, they have social responsibility, and Friedman is arguing against the law. Vince Lombardi, the football coach said, “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Substitute “profit” for “winning,” and you have Milton Friedman.

Bob Neal likes to look for unintended consequences. Whether the consequences of the actions of Robert Moses and Milton Friedman were unintended is for you to judge. Neal can be reached at [email protected].