The Difference Between Freemarket Capitalism and Stakeholder (Woke) Capitalism
This is excellent from Michael Shellenburger, even though most of it is paywalled. Michael is obviously a keen advocate of freemarket capitalism!
It’s so good because it gets to the heart of the confusion which surrounds capitalism, where most people nowadays have been brainwashed into believing that it must necessarily be bad, because it invites greed. Yes, it does, but it doesn’t have to. Greed is intrinsic to human nature, it is not an intrinsic facet of capitalism. We are all capitalists, even the simple hunter-gatherer tribes roaming the Amazon. We seek to expand our assets in order not just to survive but to make life a little easier, for ourselves and our family. The hunter-gatherer tribes define their territories and their natural assets within that territory and they will work hard to protect them. We have our homes and gardens and possessions which we also protect and which we naturally strive to improve upon. Greed comes into the picture when modest improvement become an insatiable lust for acquisition and financial and territorial conquest at the expense of others who lack such unbridled acquisitive ambition.
Hence, Michael quotes the following:
“Greed is good,” said the hostile takeover investor played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 classic, “Wall Street.” Douglas proceeded to give the standard justification of capitalism provided by Adam Smith in 1776. “Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind,” said the Douglas character.
Whereas a lust for life, love and knowledge might be considered virtuous, a lust for money, per se, cannot. The love of money is the root of all evil, they say. It’s hard to disagree. So the Woke Capitalists have solved the problem and salved their consciences by inventing an entirely fake form of altruistic capitalism. They’re not obscenely wealthy billionaires anymore, they’re philanthropists. That’s all right then. Their unbridled acquisitiveness is justified by their charitable urge to give large sums of money away to ‘needy’ causes. It’s all good. Except it’s not. It’s still the root of all evil, disguised as good. As it turns out, ‘Woke Capitalism’ is not new, it’s just ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ with fancy knobs on. Stakeholder capitalism is the evil twin of freemarket capitalism, where so called ‘stakeholders’ get to call all the shots, where they get richer and richer and the average person gets poorer and poorer and the opportunities for genuine and equitable free enterprise and personal betterment disappear into the jaws of corporatism.
Says Shellenburger:
Defenders of do-gooder capitalism say that socially-responsible investing, which was rebranded as ESG to refer to investing that takes environmental, social, and governance issues into account, has done a lot of good. They point to ESG investments in things like renewable energy, electric vehicles, and carbon offsets as proof that capitalism and philanthropy can co-exist.
But ESG has been rocked by scandal after scandal for greenwashing things that are bad for the environment, people, and democracy. Few carbon offsets actually reduce carbon emissions. Many are scams. Some pay landowners to not cut down trees they were never going to log. Others pay renewable energy developers who were already going to build wind and solar projects. Most solar panels and electric car batteries are made in Xinjiang, China by incarcerated Uyghur Muslims. Solar projects require 300-600 times more land than nuclear or natural gas plants and are devastating fragile desert environments. And there is no waste disposal solution for used solar panels, a hazardous waste, which means they will be sent to landfills or dumped on poor nations. Even Bankman-Fried acknowledges that “ESG has been perverted beyond recognition.”
“Fraud” may seem like a harsh word for describing ESG, but Black’s Law defines fraud as an activity that relies on deception in order to achieve a gain, and ESG certifiers, and sellers of solar panels and solar projects, know perfectly well that their projects violate the letter and spirit of ESG. Representatives of the renewable energy industry for years claimed their products were cheaper than other energy sources even as they were lobbying Congress for $369 billion in subsidies. And many ESG funds exclude nuclear energy even though nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint of any energy source, pays higher wages than solar, and enjoys the strictest regulatory governance of any energy source.
ESG, ‘Green investment’ and Green energy is a fraud, which diverts money from the many into the pockets of an elitist few, under the guise of doing ‘good’, in this case to address an imaginary ‘climate crisis’. It is stakeholder capitalism. Likewise, the signing of contracts with pharmaceutical companies by numerous governments worldwide to supply an ‘urgently needed’, untested and exceptionally harmful ‘vaccine’ in order to address a fake ‘global health crisis’ is also Stakeholder capitalism in its most grotesque form.
You ~(or rather Shellenberger) forgot the point that it's those same "philanthropists" who dictated that ESG is actually a benefit! First, prove that reduction of carbon emissions is what this planet actually needs!!
I often feel that we're in the same state in human affairs as Aristotle was in physics. It's 'obvious' that the Earth stands still, the Sun goes round the Earth and being at rest is the natural state of motion. In the same way it's 'obvious' that 'doing good works' will give better outcomes. It took 2 millennia for Galileo and Newton to refute Aristotle. They discovered the 'unnatural nature' of the world - we can't base our understanding on mere appearances. What we need is a renaissance in thought about the human condition just as there was in our understanding of physics.