So what's wrong with "ethical investing"?

 

What's the ESG movement, and how is it making you poorer? How are things like "triple bottom lines" destroying human flourishing? And how has government coercion increased the power of this "socially conscious" movement?

If you've noticed the move to so-called "ethical investing" and "divestment," and wondered where it came from -- and where it might be going -- then this is the interview for you. And if you're an investor (or you have a pension plan) , and you haven't yet noticed it, then this is definitely the interview to get you up to speed.

In this segment from Alex Epstein's Power Hour, he and Yaron Brook discuss this influential and destructive movement, how the culture of altruism and so-called "stakeholder theory" give it wings, how helps destroy economic value, and what you might do to challenge it. 

A great demonstration of how philosophy (even bad philosophy) has the power to move the world.

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“I don't care about the poor, I don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the rich. I care about good people who live virtuous lives, who engage in the world - who are rational, who take responsibility for their own lives." #QotD

“I don't care about the poor, I don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the rich. I care about good people who live virtuous lives, who engage in the world - who are rational, who take responsibility for their own lives. I care about virtue, good people. I know scoundrels in the upper, middle and lower class and I don't care about them. I want the irrational to suffer from their irrationality, I want the lazy to suffer from their laziness and the ones without virtue to suffer from that. Marx came up with the idea of dividing people into classes and now everyone buys into it, left, centre and right. I want hardworking people to benefit from their virtues.”
          ~ Yaron Brook
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"It's stunning how tribal Americans have become. The Left gets its marching orders from MSM, the Right from Fox and White House. Then they go out and -- repeat, repeat, repeat. No argument, no thinking, just talking points..." #QotD

"It's stunning how tribal Americans have become. The Left gets its marching orders from MSM, the Right from Fox and White House. Then they go out and -- repeat, repeat, repeat. No argument, no thinking, just talking points..."
          ~ Yaron Brook
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Uplift Friday: How Innovation Works

Difficult times need uplifting conversation. Like this ...

Consider: No matter how bad things are, we still live in amazing times -- so amazing that, even though we're all locked up, we can still watch a great interview with a fellow in a closet in the north of England!

Enjoy the conversation: The Rational Optimist talks about How Innovation Works:

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"Reason, freedom and the pursuit of personal profit — if we can learn to embrace these three ideas as ideals, a magnificent future awaits." #QotD

"Ask someone on the street to name a moral hero; if he isn’t at a loss, he’ll likely name someone like Jesus Christ or Mother Teresa. Why? Because they’re regarded as people of faith who shunned personal profit for the sake of other people. No one would dream of naming Galileo, Darwin, Edison or Rockefeller.
Yet we should. It is they at their intellectual and productive best, not the Mother Teresas of the world, that we should strive to be like and teach our kids to admire.
    "If morality is judgment to discern the truth and courage to act on it by making something of and for your own life, then these individuals, in their capacity as great creators, are moral exemplars. Put another way, if morality is a guide in the quest to achieve your own happiness by creating the values of mind and body that make a successful life, then morality is about personal profit, spiritual and material, not its renunciation....
    "Reason, freedom and the pursuit of personal profit — if we can learn to embrace these three ideas as ideals, a magnificent future awaits."
    ~ Onkhar Ghate and Yaron Brook, from their op-ed 'Our Moral Code Is Out of Date'
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QotD: "I view the world as collectivism versus individualism, not Right versus Left. And almost everybody's a collectivist."

"I view the world as collectivism versus individualism, not Right versus Left. And almost everybody [else] is a collectivist."  

    ~ Yaron Brook.

QotD: Jordan Peterson et al on inequality, the soul, and how to organise your bookshelf

@jordanbpeterson: "I don't think that you can generate wealth without generating inequality."
@yaronbrook: "Inequality is a feature of freedom, not a bug."
~ exchange from the discussion at #OCON2018 between Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Yaron Brook & Greg Salmieri on Philosophy and the Soul [VIDEO HERE]

Quote of the Day: On voluntary euthanasia

“You don’t have a right to life if you don’t have a right to end it.”
~ Yaron Brook, on the Yaron Brook Radio Show

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Quote of the Day: On our real poverty

"Art. We're poorer in that regard than in anything economic.”~ Yaron Brook

Q: Does race/ethnicity matter?

RELATED:

• Cue-Card Libertarianism: Racism – NOT PC
• Cue-Card Libertarianism: Ethnicity – NOT PC

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Quote of the Day: “You want a safety net, go do it…”

“…but don’t force me to participate if I don’t want to… [State] welfare is morally wrong. Spend your own money [if you want] to help the poor.”
~Yaron Brook

Quote of the Day: On being ‘privileged’

 

“It is common nowadays to refer to anyone with wealth or opportunities as ‘privileged.’ Loving parents don’t pass on opportunities to their children, they bestow privileges. A self-made businessman who rose from rags to riches isn’t a model of achievement— he’s privileged. Using ‘privilege’ in this way means that we don’t distinguish between children who work to make the most of the opportunities their parents give them and entitled brats who expect everything to be handed to them— and it means we don’t distinguish between those who achieve something through productive merit and those who get rich through the use of political power. In an economic context, the concept of ‘privilege’ should be reserved for those who line their pockets by taking advantage of special favours from the government— what is often called ‘cronyism’.
    “Today, the opportunities for growing rich through cronyism are legion … ”
~ Don Watkins & Yaron Brook, from their new book: Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality

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Capitalism? Moral! What the hell are you talking about?

Capitalism? Moral!  What the hell are you talking about?

Yaron Brook talks on the morality of capitalism on prime time Canadian TV.

What Should Governments Have Done During the 2008 Financial Crisis?

Yaron Brook’s answer:

Could the U.S. Federal Reserve collapse? Well, fingers crossed.

Yaron Brook discusses Ron Paul’s prediction (hope?) that the Federal Reserve might collapse.

The Great Depression and the Broken Window Fallacy

Yaron Brook discusses the economics of the Great Depression, with an explanation of the broken window fallacy, the most common error in economics.



From his talk 'Why Bad Economics Won't Go Away.'

Class warfare hits the U.S. streets

Last night the #OccupyWallStreet movement #OccupiedBoston, much to the consternation of the Boston police.

Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute joins the crew at PJTV to discuss the good and bad about the grassroots protests:

QUOTE OF THE DAY: How to cut govt spending

That’s the kind of debate we need to have … not the superficial ones about cutting ten million here or ten million there,  but [asking questions] like  “What Should Government Do?” and  “What Should Government Not Do?” and once we get that right the cutting is easy.
   - Yaron Brook,
                              ‘Rand ‘Ol Party: The Intellectual Foundations of the Tea Party,’ 
                              P J T V

“Life Imitating Rand: Al Gore, Doctor of Ecology & Enemy of Freedom” [update 2]

“Life Imitating Rand,” says PJTV:

    “In a move seemingly ripped from the pages of an Ayn Rand novel, the University of Tennessee flatters Gore and itself with an honorary doctorate in ecology – and evolutionary biology too.”

Click the pic to head to the PJTV discussion.

UPDATE 1:  Blunt sent me a relevant cartoon, which I think we have to file under “wishful thinking”:

 

UPDATE 2:  The University of Tennessee may not be able to see through Gore’s chicanery—or maybe they’re just eager to grab a slice of his ill-gotten gains—but Edward Cline can see him for what he is: a "huckster” who is “determined to revive his Climategate-damaged credibility and salvage all the money he has invested in alternative energy companies -- whose “alternatives” are lower standards of living at higher costs, alternative energy sources dependent on the vagaries of nature (i.e., natural climate change) and the whims of bureaucrats…”

“Gore’s New York Times byline claims he is a “businessman.” That would be correct if businessmen by definition were scam artists and hucksters. But such a definition would comport with the character of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the CRU -- which have been exposed as dens of thieves and con-artists. Gore is in the right company.”

Read ‘Gore’s Wishes are Your Commands’.

The “good news” about what came out of the G20? [updated]

Who’s kidding who.  “There is no good news about what happened yesterday,” says Yaron Brook. “Basically what’s going in London is world leaders have come together to establish a kind of global socialist system.  .  .  There was no one there representing capitalism, because capitalism is the dirty word right now.”

UPDATE:  “Say Cheese,” says the Rational Capitalist, who, when he first saw the picture at right thought it must have been “a doctored photo created to mock the absurdity of this meeting. “

When I realized it was not a joke it dawned on me that it is actually a perfect concretization of what is happening. I think that the frivolous connotation of the photo is the result of several related factors…

The most telling of those factors being, as the Rational Capitalist notes in a fine piece [hat tip Per-Olof Samuelsson], that these men are all pragmatic power-lusters, for whom action without thought is  their only absolute, and power over others their greatest joy – which explains both the photograph and their plan, said by Gorgon Brown to mark the emergence of a “new world order.”  An “order” in which stimulus is king, faking reality is paramount, and a crackdowns on tax havens is more important than addressing the real causes of economic collapse.

“Never waste a good crisis,” is the motto of the pragmatic politician, which is the only way to explain the link between a banking insolvency crisis and cracking down on people trying to keep their own money.

As Eric Crampton notes [hat tip Anti Dismal], it makes sense only in “Higgs sense,” in which (contra Klein) crisis is the health of the state.