Given academia’s nearly monochrome culture, most universities have many infantile adults. These are faculty members who have glided from kindergarten through postdoctoral fellowships (these often support surplus PhDs, who are being manufactured faster than the academic job market can absorb them). To such professors, the 99.9 percent of the world adjacent to campuses is as foreign as Mongolia.
Still, suppose you want to hire a recent college graduate for your business. Suppose one of your applicants attended Harvard while it was becoming an incubator of antisemitic agitations. And suppose the other applicant attended a large public university. The public-university graduate is at least marginally less apt to be enthusiastic about Hamas, which aspires to complete the Holocaust.
Or suppose you seek a young doctor to join your medical practice. You might reasonably hesitate before hiring someone from UCLA’s medical school. There a recent pro-Hamas guest lecturer in a mandatory course on “Structural Racism and Health Equity” led students in a “Free Palestine” chant, directed them to get on their knees and touch the floor in a “prayer” to “mama earth,” and warned the future doctors against the “crapitalist lie” of “private property.”
The leakage of prestige from politicized universities is overdue and wholesome. Those schools that once were preeminent and now are punchlines might soon have a bruising rendezvous with real politics, which, unlike the sandbox radicalism of campus playgrounds, can be serious.
Iain Murray describes the U.S. administrative state as hitting “warp speed.”
GMU Law alum Jeremy Kidd reports on “the wasteful cruelty of ‘stakeholder capitalism.'” Two slices:
Capitalism has raised millions, if not billions, of people out of poverty. It is the greatest engine of human flourishing that has ever existed. It is worth defending, but those willing to do so are few and far between, even in the societies that have most benefitted from the wealth that capitalism has generated. In the late twentieth century, economist Milton Friedman stood against the tide of anti-capitalist propaganda that flourished in the halls of academia.
Friedman is gone but anti-capitalism remains, and it is no longer constrained to academia. It is common in the halls of Congress (Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren come readily to mind) and even in corporate boardrooms, with the modern push for corporations to engage in ESG — Environmental, Social, and Governance — efforts. Champions of capitalism have never been more needed, and Professor R. David McLean’s 2023 book, The Case for Shareholder Capitalism: How the Pursuit of Profit Benefits All makes a strong case for inclusion in that category.
McLean begins, as a defender of capitalism should, with an explanation of profit. Not the profit that anti-capitalists caricature, some dark motive of dastardly villains, twirling their mustaches or adjusting their monocles as they plan to exploit yet another widow or orphan. McLean counters the false melodrama of the anti-capitalist with the mundane “profit” of Adam Smith. It is the (sometimes surprising) pile of money left after the small business owner has paid all of the bills for the month. It is the signal that the value a business owner creates in the lives of his fellow citizens is high enough to pay for all the inputs and have something left over.
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The mistake is not that corporations should obey the law — they should — but that all regulations impose legal or moral obligations on US citizens, including as aggregated into a corporate form. McLean’s mistake arises from an all-too-common source: failure to consider institutional structure. The US government’s power is constrained by the Constitution, so any regulation that violates the Constitution would be unenforceable. Regulatory agencies have limited discretion, and cannot impose a moral or legal obligation on corporations. McLean knows that, and may have even intended to imply it, but institutions matter, and their inadvertent omission could easily confuse. McLean effectively attacks the flaws of Corporate Social Responsibility and its ESG incarnation, calling out activists for pursuing ideological preferences at the expense of shareholders. He traces the flawed, Malthusian lineage of Corporate Social Responsibility to such historical abominations as forced abortions and sterilizations. For all these excellent and needed efforts, McLean misses the institutional questions often enough to fall just short of a complete analysis.
“Is nationalism bad for your health?”
J.D. Tuccille warns that “local hostility to free speech may become a global problem.”
