H.L. Mencken (1888-1956), a writer and scathing critic of contemporary enthusiasms, famously said, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” We are inundated with a glut of presumptive problems and a host of politically-favored and chic answers, many of them “clear, simple, and wrong”. When “clear, simple, and wrong” penetrates the command-and-control centers of organizations, they get off track and pursue ends far afield of their competency. Ironically, clear-simple-wrong answers oftentimes metastasize into obtuse mission statements littered with fashionable causes. Prepare for woe if those institutions are critical to our lives.
Thus, a business could be beguiled by a mania for “social justice”, one of the most abused phrases in modern usage. The ballyhooed answers to a suspect issue are quite probably clear, simple, and wrong but the frenzy sweeps all before it and, before we know it, ESG (environment, social, and governance) competes with profitability. The previously uncomplicated mission of profitability – which spins off many positive externalities (good things) such as more products, higher wages and fatter pensions – gets entangled in intractable social headaches. Something has to give, and right now it’s profitability with all the good that it brings.
Such is the threat of “woke capital”. Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, who has the fortune of a small nation’s GDP, who could probably buy outright one of the UN’s members, runs a company lunchroom filled with the woke . . . like him. The simple service of making social interaction easier (instant and interactive messaging) is now complicated by opinion censorship and political donations to the enemies of economic liberty. This economic liberty is often brusquely referred to as “capitalism”. The Twitter minions are oddly supportive of the people who would strangle their capitalistic enterprise, born of economic liberty, in the crib. It’s one of the purest examples of self-negation.
MLB, Inc., is another example. Somehow, the suits and the boys in smelly locker rooms became the arbiters of election laws. The simple act of very skilled athletes playing a stick-and-ball sport was complicated with the mission to advance the political interests of Stacy Abrams and the Georgia Democratic Party. The balancing of election integrity with the open franchise, something in the wheelhouse of government where the issues are raised and deliberated by elected representatives, is thrown askew by corporate leaders wasting their corporate reputations on a partisan crusade. One would think that angering 60-70% of your fan base is not a wise business decision. It is only possible when a business organization forgets itself and tries to act like a political one. It’s the culmination of millionaire celebrity athletes and their managing Manhattan suits – so dismissive of those smelly Walmart shoppers who buy the caps, jerseys, and big-screen tv’s – losing sight of batting averages, rbi’s, era’s, obp’s, and wins and losses.
At one time, there was an Al Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who was like most franchise owners when he said, “Just win, baby.” Today, it’s “Just win, baby, and fight voter suppression.” A greater incongruency is hard to imagine.
Pro baseball as Democrat hitman doesn’t comport. Neither does Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg functioning as Democratic Party get-out-the-vote bankroller in 2020, but, oh, he was. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan (a real doctor as opposed to “doctor” Jill Biden), would say that they were helping “underserved communities” when they threw $419.5 million to two Democrat-friendly pass-throughs: the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) and The Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR). “Underserved” is another one of those words mangled by today’s politics.
From these two partisan philanthropies, the cash was laundered to biased groups in Democrat-rich localities. How was the money used? Consuming most of the cash was issue advocacy – universal mail-in balloting, opposing voter ID laws, etc. – staffing inner-city election offices with employees of partisan groups like Stacy Abrams’s Happy Faces, and flooding selected precincts with paid canvassers to “assist” voters and, get this, the “curing” (?) of ballots. How targeted was the effort? 25 of the 26 grants from these two NGO’s went to cities and counties won by Biden, statistically enough to swing Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to the donkey party.
It’s the same scene from the c-suites in shiny towers in deep blue metropolises to the air waves in “socially responsible” smiley-faced ads. All of the excitable ad terms are so dastardly vague, which is ideal for lefty crusades. “Socially responsible”? “Environment”? “Governance”? “Stakeholders”? If you want to talk about dog whistles, here you have the piercing sounds that’ll draw the lefty wolf packs from the far corners of the globe. The vocabulary draws out the socialistic fascism so near and dear to the swarming activists of the lefty hive.
That most fascist of all terms, “stakeholders”, is a classic. Mussolini foisted this canard on Italians and called it “corporatism”. In it, activist interests were organized into the “state”, “corporate management”, and “labor”. Just add “community voices” – i.e., lefty groups and their legal arm – to the mix and you have the “stakeholders” of “stakeholder capitalism”. Who decides the direction of this lumbering entity? Easy, the state, which means the politically powerful. Economic decisions become political decisions.
Socialism, of whatever stripe, isn’t an economic system; it’s a political one.
Is that any way to run an economy, by and for politicians and their unelected, cloistered coterie of regulators and allied NGO’s? It’s not that it hasn’t been done before. It was in many places, and in a place called the Soviet Union. Economists christened the practice “central planning”. Almost all activity goes through, or falls under the ever-watchful gaze, of the state. Take any lefty with power to wield in the U.S. Congress and you’ll see exhibited their inner-Soviet. Here’s a snippet from the Socrates of the House Progressive Caucus, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), commenting in late September on their demand to pass the House Dems’ central planning bill (the $3.5-5 trillion monstrosity),
“. . . we have to deliver on the entirety of the president’s agenda [the humungous $3.5-5 trillion expansion of the state]. We have to deliver on child care [the state]. We have to deliver on paid leave [the state]. We have to make sure people can go to free community college [the state]. We need to make sure we’re taking on climate change [the state, big time]. We have got to address housing and immigration [the state and the state].”
These people are all about the state. They might as well plaster El Duce’s famous dictum – “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” – on Democratic Party headquarters in DC. The only difference between Mussolini’s brand of socialism and Lenin’s is that El Duce allowed the face-saving gesture of shareholders possessing the paper, but that is meaningless when the state tells you what do with them. State control trumps liberty, just as it was in Lenin’s Politburo, and just as it will be for the House Progressive Caucus.
And these people have the gall to call advocates of economic liberty fascists. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
The incongruous mashing of fascistic lefty activism with corporate shareholder governance creates a Frankenstein. Issues of moral import, that used to be dealt with under the principle of one man, one vote – meaning consensual government, a republic, our Constitution – are now to be decided in forums where its one share, one vote. Think about it. Institutional investors owning a million shares – like the lefty-managed BlackRock in Manhattan – have a million votes in setting corporate policies and filling management slots, not one vote. There might be thousands of stockholders but only a few are the big gorillas in the room. Imagine a huge slice of the economic fortunes of an entire nation being run according to the conscience of Manhattan.
Orwell’s Animal Farm had the ruling pigs change the central moral of the movement to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The owners of passels of shares, and thus “more equal than others”, include arms of the state like the state employee pension funds. Teamster pension-fund corruption has nothing on these lefty politicians and their allied activist organizations. These pension systems are slush funds for lefty activism, and to hell with the fiduciary responsibility to create a stable retirement for a worn-out firefighter. Sounds like corporatism to me.
In this regard, we could profit from an extended timeout in making new laws and inventing more ways to spend more money. The National Archives are already busting at the seams. It should be apparent by now that there is a law on the books covering nearly everything that rankles us. Don’t like guns? Well, there’s a good part of the U.S. criminal code devoted to them. Don’t like climate-change alarmists and CRT hustlers messing around with your retirement? There’s the Employee Retirement Investment Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, coming on the heels of the 1960’s scandals in union-run pension systems. The law requires the highest priority be rate of return, not social causes that drive the imaginations of progressives. With retirements exploding and hefty payouts looming, money-managers would be insane to focus on anything but the highest rate of return. But, alas, that isn’t the case.
Biden has made a hash of the borders, Afghanistan, policing and civil peace, the jobs picture, inflation, energy, and all of it made worse by his COVID-authoritarianism. Add to the list mucking up our retirements. ERISA and rulemaking since ’74 wouldn’t forbid today’s ESG (or SR, “socially conscious”) investments but they must meet the rate of return standard. Fact is, the standard is no standard, post-Trump. Biden announced that his Labor Department won’t enforce the rule, leaving ample room to indulge in poor-performing ESG stock-picking.
Those ESG pickings are duds. Alicia Munnel of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research: “I really have no respect for ESG investing”. Tariq Fancy, former head of BlackRock’s sustainable investing wing:
“The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it’s not . . . . In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community”
Now Biden promises to do to us what he did to the Afghans. After some cop video goes viral, expect corporate shareholder and board meetings to embrace ESG and denounce one or another institution of civil order, and it’s off to the eventual liquidation of our pensions.
But what makes these corporate gatherings, dominated as they are by investor goliaths on a lefty jihad, the proper forum to adjudicate controversial public policies? Nothing. Corporate big cheeses, with shareholding King Kongs watching their backs, have a free hand in imposing their prejudices and social preferences on the mass of shareholders and the public at large. Gone is the need for representative assemblies, a court system to apply the law, and an elected executive to carry it out. Following the SR (“Social Responsibility”) peddlers, public policy is to be settled among the large caps in Manhattan, California’s Bay Area, LA, Washington State’s Puget Sound, Chicago, and the other c-suites in any million+ metropolitan area. Delta Airlines, Inc., may as well replace its logo with a donkey.
A favorite cause for the hyper-wealthy in their walled estates in their zoned-for-exclusion neighborhoods is the usual “climate change” and a raft of environmentalism’s other assorted extreme goals. For these people, insulated from the harmful effects of their beliefs by their ample portfolios, “follow the science” means that they have no intention of following it. Going from the heat trapping qualities of certain gases in lab experiments to the disappearance of Micronesia and the California coastal plain is more than a stretch. It’s a novel and properly placed in the library’s fiction section. A host of scientific variables are rolled to get right to the super-greenie end state.
It’s not the scientific method, hinging as it is on falsifiability (a testable hypothesis, one that can be proven correct or no). In the mind of the brain-dead activist, they go from a frenzied political assertion – not a real hypothesis with falsifiability – to coercion. This isn’t “follow the science”. It’s follow AOC.
Speaking of revolutionary public policy based on such hysterics, we have the greenie leviathan in the form of The Green New Deal waiting in the wings. Much of the Fortune 500 is fully onboard. But greenie energy doesn’t work. You can’t repeal the laws of physics and fiscal sanity by replacing high-density energy (fossil fuels, nuclear) for low-density (wind mills, solar panels, bio-mass) without a corresponding deterioration in the quality of life. That’s certainly one way to reduce the wealth gap: shove the middle class into welfare dependency.
Forget about the rich, Lizzy Warren, they’ve got enough money in the bank to buy your vote, place on retainer an army of mercenaries in prestigious law firms, and to set up shop beyond your clutches.
It’s more than being “clear, simple, and wrong”. It’s the titans of industry operating out of their lane. Public policy is meant for a public to decide through their representative assemblies. Mars Candies needs to stick to innovating M&M’s. Delta Airlines needs to concentrate on making air travel affordable and more enjoyable. CalSTRS should have a single-minded focus on stable retirements for teachers. Everybody in their lane of competency and prudence.
In other words, shut up and sing. We could do without the bigs turning my ticket purchase into a back-channel endorsement of Stacy Abrams, Earth First, and Al Gore visits to Davos.
RogerG