A Heretic in the Climate Church

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Scientists have traditionally tended to appreciate the usefulness of disagreement or, where necessary, to take it in stride and move on. (A flat Earth, you say? Oookay.) But in many faiths, dissent is heresy. The offender must be cast out, or worse.

Moral Money is, as its name implies, a particularly sanctimonious corner of the Financial Times. It is focused on the likes of ESG (a variant of “socially responsible” investing that measures actual or potential portfolio companies against environmental, social, and governance standards), “stakeholder capitalism,” and other facets of a kumbaya capitalism superior to the Gekko-hearted incumbent, or so the cleverly marketed corporatist story goes.

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The ‘Sustainability’ Business: A Gathering of Rent-Seekers

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The Economist Group, publisher of the Economist, has been hosting its seventh annual “Sustainability Week,” with one day in London and three others on virtual platforms.

The event’s website offers a revealing glimpse into the ecosystem that “sustainability” has created — an ecosystem that contains true believers, to be sure, but is also one in which opportunists can take advantage of the pathway it offers to power, profit, and prestige — or at least a job.

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Larry Fink, ‘Emperor’?

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We live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.

Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….

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The CEO as ‘Lawmaker’: A Corporatist Manifesto

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On Monday, the Financial Times ran an article by Paul Polman, the former CEO of Unilever (a company that, as he mentions, was recently in the news over its pursuit of objectives seemingly unconnected to its bottom line). A forceful, if unpersuasive, argument for stakeholder capitalism, it is an interesting and unintentionally revealing read. Above all, it demonstrates how, whatever BlackRock’s Larry Fink may claim, stakeholder capitalism is intrinsically political. Indeed, as it is an expression of corporatism, that is — or ought to be — a statement of the obvious. Corporatism, regardless of the form it takes, is an ideology revolving around an idea of how society should be organized. That is the very essence of politics…

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Larry Fink and the Wrong Kind of Capitalism

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It’s the time of year when Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, comes out with his annual letter to CEOs, a letter in which he tells CEOs what he expects of them. As BlackRock marked the end of 2021 by passing the benchmark of $10 trillion under management, an impressive figure however you look at it, many CEOs will treat Fink’s thoughts with rather more respect than their shareholders or our democracy deserve — $10 trillion will do that.

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Charles the Climate Prince

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At a time when the monarch, James I, “the wisest fool in Christendom,” believed in the divine right of kings, it was perhaps tactless of the English jurist John Selden (1584–1654) to write:

A king is a thing men have made for their own sakes, for quietness’ sake. Just as in a family one man is appointed to buy the meat . . .

Commentary such as this meant that Selden spent a short time in the Tower of London. Nevertheless, he lived long enough to see James’s son, Charles, being found surplus to requirements.

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Climate, Democracy, and Other People’s Money

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Reconciling the climate warriors’ agenda with either free markets or basic democratic accountability is not — how to put this — straightforward. Those attending the COP-26 conference now under way in Scotland are not trying that hard to conceal this unpleasant reality. Of course, so far as the d-word is concerned, current circumstances mean that such an exercise would be even more difficult than usual. As the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg observed…

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Stakeholder Capitalism: Corporatism by Another Name

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The, well, woke nature of “woke capitalism” — a phenomenon intertwined with “socially responsible” investment (SRI), with stakeholder capitalism at its base — has obscured that the way in which this combination works owes far more to fascism than to socialism. Nearly 90 years ago, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “employing Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” Overwrought, perhaps, but not without some truth. He would recognize what is going on now for what it is.

Underpinning the notion of “stakeholder capitalism,” a concept that has taken the C-suites of some of America’s largest companies by storm, is the idea that a company should be run for the benefit of all its “stakeholders,” a conveniently hazy term that can be defined to include (among others) workers, customers, and “the community,” as well as the shareholders who, you know, own the business. It’s a form of expropriation based on the myth that a corporation that puts its shareholders first must necessarily put everyone else last. In reality, an enterprise that, to a greater or lesser extent, fails to consider the needs of various — to use that word — stakeholders in mind, customers, most obviously (but certainly not only) is unlikely to flourish, and nor, therefore, will its owners.

Stakeholder capitalism is not only a threat to private property, but also, by not much of a stretch of the imagination, to individual freedom. To understand why, take a step back.

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Turning the Corporate Left's Own Tools against It

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To say that tackling woke capitalism will not be easy is an understatement. Its ascent is the product of, among many other factors, the political challenge posed to free markets by a misunderstood financial crisis, the relentless leftward drift of our institutions, and, as always, the jockeying for power — and its prizes — among our elites. And then there is the manner in which anxiety over climate change — a key contributor to the current effort to redefine the nature and purpose of a corporation — is being used to overturn many of the economic and political assumptions on which our society is organized, thus intensifying what is already a perfect storm. Oh yes, there is also the small matter of the Democrat several months into his term in the White House, and the kind of president that he is proving to be.

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Putting the Grift in ESG

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On the whole, I would prefer to live in a society run by cynics rather than saints—cynics tend to be less intrusive. However, when cynics pretend to be saints, they are playing a dangerous game, as many of those on Wall Street now peddling “socially responsible” investment (SRI) may soon discover. To be clear, I have no doubt that some of those pushing for more SRI (or the closely related concept of stakeholder capitalism) are true believers. Others, perhaps the smartest, are jockeying for positions of power — and the perks that come with it — under a corporatist regime (stakeholder capitalism is essentially an expression of corporatism). Still others are simply following the ancient Wall Street practice of repackaging nonsense and selling it at a profit…

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