The ESG Conspiracy

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill, House of Commons, Oct. 22, 1945

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

 Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations," Book IV, Chapter 2 

In the words of Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises from "A Critique of Interventionism," “there is no other choice: government either abstains from limited interference with market forces, or it assumes total control over production and distribution. Either capitalism or socialism; there is no middle of the road.” Western nations are now in thrall to globalist oligarchs and billionaire socialists who control the apparatus of government. These are, in effect, the political obesogens that are destroying the energy resources and nutrient vitality of the nation, creating a milieu bloated with debt, economically static and inherently unproductive, its resources siphoned off by an omnivorous and impenitent overclass to feed its appetite.

There is a third economic engine Mises does not directly consider, known as a “mixed economy,” often described as a “socialist market economy,” as in China. But it is still far more “socialist” than “mixed.” In this oxymoronic structure, the private sector must answer to the central government. It is “socialist” in the sense of National Socialism or fascism, defined by Mussolini in "The Doctrine of Fascism" (the first part of which is owing to the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile) as “the merger of state and corporate power.” Fascism is better understood, Mussolini stressed, as Corporatism, in which social groups, industrial organizations, and economic agencies, while maintaining a thin modicum of independence, work for the “common good” as dictated by the State. Corporatism is thus linked to socialism on one side and capitalism on the other — the so-called “mixed economy,” which is essentially a fascist clone. 

The issue grows somewhat more complicated in the West. Seamus Bruner shows in his comprehensive exposé, "Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life," that in the development of globalist ideology in the West, increasingly autocratic governments in their turn answer to the billionaire class, which ultimately sets national economic priorities. This is clearly the direction in which governance is moving in the West, which is, in actual practice, nothing but the contemporary and elaborated form of socialism, the abolition of both personal ownership (“you will own nothing and be happy”) and freely exercised market-based exchange of capital goods, as it pertains to a common electorate, all in the interests of a plutocratic minority (who will own everything). 

Money has always been the major influence in political life, but never have we seen an amniotic elite covering the political world and controlling sums, as Bruner notes, larger than the GDP of more than half the world’s countries. A tsunamic wave of unimaginable wealth unleashed by a few individuals with ulterior motives can be devastating. The political and economic innovation this clade represents may best be described, so far as I understand it, as a kind of oligarchic socialism, which is neither fully market-oriented nor wholly collective, neither entirely “free” nor completely communal. In other words, it is neither fascist (hierarchical ideal) nor communist (communitarian ideal), but something quite different. 

Of course, totalitarian entities in any shape or form are subject to the rule of elites, but in oligarchic socialism, the elites are those who belong to an exclusive aristocracy of wealth and whose social ideas flow from what Thomas Sowell calls the “the vision of the anointed” — those who assert the need for government intervention in economic affairs, who argue for “compassion” despite “disastrous impact on the poor,” and who are convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority over the masses. Sowell writes: “Surrogate decision making is the common thread in the highly disparate crusades which have captured the imagination and sparked the fervor of the anointed at various times, whether this moral surrogacy was in the form of the eugenics movement, Keynesian economics, or environmentalism.” It is now in the business of remaking the world.

There is no doubt that free-market capitalist society is now under sustained and vehement attack. One of the ways to bankrupt or severely impact the capitalist order is the brainchild of our sodality of oligarchic socialists (or variously, Marxo-capitalists) represented by the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement. ESG and what has come to be called “stakeholder capitalism” go hand in hand. The terms are interchangeable. The theory of stakeholder capitalism, developed by R. Edward Freeman in his 1984 book "Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach" and popularized by former WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab in "Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet" (co-authored with Fortune’s  Peter Vanham), argues that companies should seek long-term value creation instead of short-term profit. “We need a society, economy, and international community that is designed to care for all people and the entire planet,” Schwab writes. It’s a noble idea but, like many noble, quasi-utopian ideas, it never works in practice.

The Heritage Foundation explains that ESG has weaponized capital, prioritizing environmental and “social justice” issues such as female equity, DEI, LGBTQ+, carbon mitigation, wind farms and solar panels, and the rest of the progressivist baggage. “Capital is thus diverted to causes and purposes the private investor never intended to support.” ESG is basically the theft of investors’ money. The authorities who invest our money do not invest it for our benefit but for their own social and political goals, a violation of their contractual obligation.

Related: The EV Scam: A Likely Reason for So Epic a Folly

Similarly, according to Andrew Stuttaford at National Review Online, ESG and its twin, stakeholder capitalism, are forms of expropriation of investor interests in favor of serving racial and gender “equity,” a more “equitable” future, a dirigiste version of “public health,” and ultimately of saving the planet. The problem is that “Stakeholder capitalism is not only a threat to private property, but also to individual freedom.” By cannily replacing the term and concept of “stockholder” with the homophonic “stakeholder,” ESG and stakeholder capitalism contribute to the dilution of corporate responsibility, discourage growth and investment, and attack property rights. As James Madison said (The Federalist No. 10), “the first object of government [is] the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” 

ESG is an important phenomenon not only for its practical effect on the economic life of ordinary citizens and private or unionized investors but as a symbolic expression of the new manifestation that socialism has adopted, the terrace dynamic that favors both the economic interests and the political motivations of the mandarin skim of the population. A deep-pocket capitalist whose worldview is inherently Marxist is an oligarchic socialist, a theoretical contradiction but a systematic driver of economic life in the service of a globalist ideology.

We are, in fact, dealing with an ideology that needs to be fought on various levels — populist revolt, as in Italy, the Netherlands, El Salvador, and Argentina; an incentivized return to Christian Nationalism, as in Hungary; intelligent voting, unfortunately rare and far between (one notes the recent electoral disasters in Biden’s U.S., Trudeau’s Canada, Lula’s Brazil, Albanese’s Australia, and now Starmer’s Britain); or “reciprocal lawfare [which] must be a response to the lawfare experienced now in the United States,” as Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec urge in "Unhumans." But an excellent tactic is divestment from asset managers and hedge funds like BlackRock, Bridgewater, and Citadel, as the state of Florida has recently done. 

“Using our cash to fund BlackRock's social-engineering project isn't something Florida ever signed up for,” said Florida's chief financial officer. “It's got nothing to do with maximizing returns and is the opposite of what an asset manager is paid to do.” Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas, among other states, have followed suit. BlackRock shares have thus far fallen 41% from the prior quarter, according to the firm’s recently announced second quarter results.

There certainly won’t be a derecho of withdrawals, but a gradual erosion of ESG assets seems a pragmatic way of reaffirming the real value, fiscal and democratic, of a free-market economy and its focus on general prosperity and individual initiative. It's a start.