Gored by Al Gore

If you stab someone with a sword then you have successfully gored them. After reading Al Gore’s latest mind poop in the Wall Street Journal* I feel like someone stabbed me.

There’s nothing like an emergency to bring out the Kooks. They say something like, “Aha, I told you so. If you don’t put away your toys at night, the goblins will come and haunt you. You see, that hurricane came and destroyed our house. If you had just kept your room cleaner, then none of this would have happened.”

And so Al Gore for the ten thousandth time has another reason to get behind his bloody pulpit and tell us the same things over and over and over.

It’s hardly worth rehashing but Covid has me bored and this process might be good for my mental health.

Let’s start with the title of his piece...Capitalism After Coronavirus.  He says he prefers sustainable capitalism to mere capitalism. Really, what does Al Gore know or even like about capitalism before or after Corona? The answer is nothing. Capitalism is the antithesis of what he calls sustainable capitalism. It’s a mind/word game to make you think he isn’t trying to turn the world up-side-down for his own philosophical and political needs.

Capitalism is defined as an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than the state. He wants just the opposite. He loves the word stakeholders. When firms decide to raise the price of raisins – he wants  the owners of Raisin Are Us to be joined in the decision by the city council, the Boys and Girls Club board, the labor council, Save our Bees Club, and a lot of others who might be impacted or at least insulted by the price of raisins. Of course, with Al Gore, a lengthy study on the impact on global climate change would be required as well.

Reading Gore would make one think that capitalism is now running roughshod in the world without government regulation and without plenty of representation by labor and other groups. One might think that most company boards are sitting around in luxurious meeting rooms drinking expensive Spanish Cava talking in hushed voices about how they are going to acquire reams of money to exceed the fortune of Scrooge McDuck. And of course, they do all this over the broken backs of their employees and neighbors while farting huge dark clouds of poisonous gas into the atmosphere.

If one wants to think of corporations that way, that’s okay. I am sure there are plenty of companies who fit the bill. But to think that most companies will be better off or to think the country will be better off with even more ESG, then you have a lot of convincing to do. By the way, I had to look that up. ESG means environmental, social, and governmental factors.

Isn’t it interesting how extreme he writes. He says “All investments made today must factor in long-term climate and social implications.” Are you kidding me? Does he know what the word “all” means? Investment is what makes us more competitive and it builds our future. Do we really have to hire a team of accountants and lawyers every single time we buy a piece of capital? Did I say every single time?

And then there is the very explicit idea that everything is class struggle. The ESG notion presumes that those fat cats smoking Cuban cigars and eating caviar have a huge disdain for all those employees – all those programmers, accountants, and factory hands. Those owners apparently revel in stealing a dollar from their unsuspecting employees. Nowhere does Gore show any understanding of modern management wherein output and profit is a joint result of a management team best employing capital, labor and technology within the laws of society to ensure prosperity and survival.

Has Gore ever held a job? Has he never seen how companies must be smart and work hard to survive? Does a smart company treat its employees like crap? Does a smart company ignore its social surroundings? Does a smart company always focus on quick gains at the expense of long-term stability and growth? 

One last point of emphasis. I am not decrying government regulation of business. When companies act badly, they should be fried. And there are always new situations which could result in even more government regulation. What I am saying in this post is that Al Gore has a political agenda and he doesn’t know when to say no. He doesn’t want capitalism of any kind. He wants government control of the economy. He wants to treat equity and environmental issues before anything else.

He wants to throw out the baby with the dirty bathwater. I don’t.

* Al Gore and David Blood WSJ 6/30/20 Capitalism After Coronavirus