The Dangers of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ – By Andrew Stuttaford (National Review) / Aug 25 2020
In effect, its advocates are insisting that corporate money and power should be conscripted to force through a social and political agenda — without the bother of going through the ballot box.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Andy Puzder took aim at Joe Biden’s embrace of “stakeholder capitalism,” the doctrine now being touted as a replacement for the quaint notion that a company should be run for the benefit of those — the shareholders — who own it. Stakeholder capitalism is a modish name for what is just another expression of corporatism, an old ideology with a sometimes sinister past that, because of the power it gives to the unelected and the unaccountable, will never fall far out of style. That, in this case, it involves playing around with other people’s money only adds to its sleazy appeal
Puzder notes that Biden has called for “an end to the era of shareholder capitalism” and that he has rejected the argument that a company’s primary responsibility is to generate returns for shareholders as “untrue and a farce.”
To be fair, Biden has hardly been alone in supporting a proposition that resonates far beyond what is conventionally understood as the Left. In December, Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (the organization perhaps best known for its annual meeting in Davos, and that hosted China’s Xi, a corporatist of a different stripe, just a year or so back) excitedly wrote that stakeholder capitalism was “gaining momentum.” Why was this?
Continue to article: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/stakeholder-capitalism-corporate-money-power-serve-political-agenda/
