Posted on 02/09/2022 4:48:38 AM PST by MtnClimber
Capitalism knows only one color: that color is green; all else is necessarily subservient to it, hence, race, gender, and ethnicity cannot be considered within it. – Sowell
Over the past few years, I have often wondered how corporations have spurned their customer base in the pursuit of activism and how they have remained in business? How did corporations get so detached from profits that they can shun a good percentage of their consumer base and still keep their share prices stable or growing? I found the answer in Conscious Capitalism and ESG investing.
I first heard of Conscious Capitalism a decade ago in a speech by Whole Foods founder, John Mackey. Conscious Capitalism is the brainchild of Mackey, and it’s his assertion that capitalism can have a philanthropic motive and not just a profit motive. However, in Mackey’s view, philanthropy pre-empts the profit motive and profit is just a byproduct of doing good business.
Conscious Capitalism is a feel-good story until one considers that when philanthropy subverts the profit motive and the business is no longer responding to the demands of the marketplace, the business no longer serves a purpose at all. There is no shortage of charities that don’t require empty patronage for participation. Merely meeting the demand of the public while employing thousands of people in local communities is in itself a public good.
ESG stands for Environmental Social Governance, and in ESG investing a qualitative score is applied to businesses based on how well they conform to leftist social movements. Often, these individual businesses are then bundled into funds with other high-scoring businesses. One comparison of this system that has been made is to China’s social credit system, whereby your position in society is based on how well you comply with the dictates of the government.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Capitalism is actually a marxist word. Communists and socialist nations still have “businesses”. It’s a matter of degree of how far aligned they are with the state and controlled by it.
Individual property rights and free markets is the better way to think of “capitalism”. Economically it’s defined as private production and distribution. Socialism is gov distribution. Communism is both gov distribution and production.
hey wokesters, you are not required to be for profit
The author makes a tangential connection to China but it is China that is the very root of the problem. If a manufacturer fails to move his manufacturing to China to bring his price points down, he loses business to his competitor who has already gone to China.
If a distributor of goods fails to import cheaper goods from China he loses sales and market share to his competitor who imports from China.
Hence, we have a race to the bottom. This has very little to do with noble motivations to do good even as one does well, rather, the noble sediments are dredged up to rationalize profit motive, or rather profit necessity. The same analysis can be applied to immigration and cheap labor.
It is pointless to argue that the executive who does business in China is greedy or unpatriotic, our system is so rigged that he must do so or be removed. The solution is to fix the system.
Good point.
Capitalism did not go woke.
Partisan corporation executives pandering to Blacks went woke
Corporate wokeism is becoming institutionalized as access to capital is influenced by a companies ESG score. The SEC is looking at making ESG part of its reporting requirements.
Capitalism has long since abandoned its “arms’ length” transactions, where each party comes to the table with clear objectives, and the “laissez-faire” doctrine of letting the market determine activity, without government interference.
Now it has become “corporate state” crony capitalism, with the non-business forces determining business practices, essentially choosing “winners” and “losers”.
The central proposition of both German National Socialism and Italian Fascism is that the corporations were but extensions of the State, a fiction which was supposed to differentiate them for Communism. Therefore, to Communists, both of these ideologies were considered “right-wing”.
But at their heart, command-and-control regimes are all alike, stifling individual freedom and regimentation of every aspect of life. Perhaps this was the normal condition of mankind, until the Enlightenment, and the proposition that all men are subject only to the rule of the Creator, and that they choose their leaders to further that cause.
This has led to great turmoil in the world at large over the past few centuries. Kings were overthrown, and pseudo-kings, tyrants, rose in their place, before individual freedom was truly established.
I guess Jimmy Crow wasn't woke enough. God bless the Sears catalog who thought making money from all people was a great idea.
The article doesn't really say "how" corps. went woke. Who insisted that corps. seek a good ESG score? Is it the hedge funds over the past two decades pushing board rooms to adopt ESG? Certainly when Chelsea Clinton joins a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, you know it's not for any amazing business insight she brings to investment analysis. Seems there's a million hedge funds these days, all run by leftists who claim to hate profits.
Sears is dead
That’s right, so is capitalism.
‘Woke Coke”
You are very misinformed and totally wrong.
There is always Capitalism, as there is always Capital.
The question is, how is the Capital distributed, in the hands of a few, as in Communism, where the State controls the Capital, or what we have now, Capital concentrated in the hands of a relative few?
Oops, got cut off:
The question is, how is the Capital distributed, in the hands of a few, as in Communism, where the State controls the Capital, or what we have now, Capital concentrated in the hands of a relative few large Global Conglomerates.
Either way, it’s bad juju.
Not at all. We haven’t had capitalism in over a hundred years. What we have now, is a government backstopped system, that uses artificially low interest rates from .gov, etc etc. The list is endless, financial bailouts, qe2,3, . In no form is this capitalism.
What we haven’t had is Free Enterprise.
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