Climate policy’s latest threat to property rights

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Say what you will about Jamie Dimon, the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, but when it comes to property rights, he is pretty consistent. He was chairman of the Business Roundtable when, in 2019, in a statement co-signed by a large number of CEOs, it jettisoned its support for shareholder primacy — the idea that the principal purpose of a corporation is to generate return for its shareholders. That was old hat. Now corporations should “deliver value” to all their stakeholders, of which shareholders are only one class.

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Stranded: The False Promise of Electric Cars

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The more the state ‘plans,’” wrote Hayek, “the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” This may resonate with the driver of an electric vehicle (EV) who has pulled up at a charging station in the middle of nowhere, only to find it broken.

In January last year, Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Stellantis, the world’s fifth-largest carmaker (it was formed by the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot), described electrification as “a technology chosen by politicians” and said it was “imposed” on the auto sector. By contrast, the triumph of the internal-combustion engine (ICE) over a century ago was organic. Human ingenuity and the power of markets led to a product that swept almost everything else off the road. EVs (which first had a moment around 1900) were not banned, and neither was the horse. In due course, ICE horseless carriages for the Astors were followed by the Model T and its kin. The automotive age had truly arrived…

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To Be Anti-ESG Is to Be against Free Market Capitalism? Not So Much.

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With environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing — a profoundly political “discipline” in which actual or prospective portfolio companies are measured against a varying selection of environmental, social and governance metrics — finally coming under the fire that it deserves, its advocates are rushing to its defense, many of them seemingly outraged that a political agenda has attracted the attention of elected politicians who disagree with it…

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