One of the consequences of Disney’s woke agenda for its bottom line is the very real threat that shareholders will take a hike if the stock price plunges or if they perceive Disney management to be poor caretakers of the Disney brand.
DisneyBizJournal.com editor Ray Keating is sounding an alarm for Disney management — specifically CEO Bob Chapek.
“Here’s a suggestion for Disney CEO Bob Chapek: Get back to business, that is, excellence in storytelling, and stop wasting shareholder’s money on political crusades that have nothing to do with Disney’s business,” Keating told Fox News Digital.
Keating, who has written about how Disney’s activism is bad for business, said Disney’s decisions on the Florida bill has meant the company is catching heat from both sides of the political spectrum. Ever since Chapek spoke up, critics on the right have condemned Disney as being too “woke” and even talked of boycotting the resort.
“Disney’s management succumbed to political pressure from activists on the Left, and now it’s getting hit from the Left and the Right,” Keating told Fox News Digital. “If I weren’t a shareholder, I’d find it amusing.”
Keating references one of economist Milton Friedman’s most important essays on “the social responsibility of business” to make his point. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits” was written in 1970 — another time of great social upheaval when calls for an end to capitalism were even louder than they are today.
Keating summarized a few of the main points of the essay:
- “The discussions of the ‘social responsibilities of business’ are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor.”
- “In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose – for example, a hospital or a school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objectives but the rendering of certain services.”
Keating is trying to make the point that Chapek and the rest of Disney management who are embracing this crusade are taking money from the pockets of those whom, by law, they have a fiduciary responsibility to protect.
In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his ‘social responsibility’ reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.”
Chapek may be the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, but DeSantis has the majority of the country on his side. And that counts for a helluva lot more to protect the sensibilities of children and allow them to maintain the innocence of childhood a little longer than a few hysterical LGBTQ activists and their allies who are deliberately misinterpreting a law.