Phil Gramm and Jeb Hensarling report that “ESG may be eating away at your investments.” A slice:
President Trump recently signed an executive order that aims to end a 20-year experiment in backdoor socialism usurping private wealth to serve special interests. It affirms fiduciary responsibility and extends it to proxy advisers “that prioritize radical political agendas over investor returns.” Fiduciary responsibility requires investment managers and advisers to act in “the best interest of the investor,” and it applies even when the investor is seeking nonfinancial outcomes such as environmental, social, faith-based or humanitarian gains.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins’s recent announcement that the commission is reviewing Biden-era rules governing so-called environmental, social and governance funds affirms this point. Fiduciary duty requires investment managers and advisers to exercise loyalty and care to ensure that investment objectives, whether financial or nonfinancial, are fulfilled.
Pursuing ESG objectives without the investor’s expressed consent has been part of a thinly veiled attempt by progressives to coerce investment managers and private corporations to advance their political goals and not the investors’ interest. This process began in 2006 when United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the Principles for Responsible Investment initiative. Loud activists with anticarbon and pro-DEI agendas have colluded with asset managers to push through hundreds of corporate stockholder resolutions contrary to the financial interests of general investors.
As investors have noticed that ESG constraints produce lower returns while delivering few environmental or social benefits, opposition to ESG has grown. While the Biden administration used the same government agencies charged with protecting fiduciary responsibility to promote ESG, investor support for ESG stockholder resolutions fell from 33% in 2021 to 13% in 2025. The number of ESG proposals voted on in the last proxy year dropped 33% from the previous year. Support for ESG resolutions by asset managers, voting the shares of their investors, has dropped from 46% in 2021 to 18% in 2025.
Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich made his name as the author of “The Population Bomb,” a 1968 book that shaped the way many in his generation thought about demographics. He died on Friday at age 93, having lived long enough to see the world’s population quadruple.
He wrote that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” during the 1970s. The actual number of people who died in famines that decade: Under 4 million. It was under 2 million in the 1980s, and under 1 million in the 2000s, as the world’s population continued to climb.
In fact, famines today occur because of state failure or war, not natural causes or excess population. That’s because farming has become much more efficient. The world’s average farmer can now grow roughly twice as much rice and soybeans, or two-and-a-half times as much wheat or maize, on the same amount of land as he could in 1968.
Also writing about the late Paul Ehrlich is Ron Bailey. A slice:
Ehrlich seemingly never encountered a prediction of doom that he failed to embrace. For example, he was all-in on the projections of imminent economic collapse from nonrenewable resource depletion as argued in the Club of Rome’s 1972 book The Limits to Growth. In fact, Ehrlich was so confident that he bet University of Maryland cornucopian economist Julian Simon that a $1,000 basket of five commodity metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) selected by Ehrlich would increase in real prices between 1980 and 1990. If the combined inflation-adjusted prices rose above $1,000, Simon would pay the difference. If they fell below $1,000, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. In October 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $576.07. The price of the basket of metals chosen by Ehrlich and his cohorts had fallen by more than 50 percent.
Here’s more wisdom from Arnold Kling:
There is no way for you to believe that the ratio of your net worth to that of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos corresponds to your worth as a human being relative to theirs. But as far as the economy goes, chances are that they have created far more wealth than what they obtained for themselves. So strictly from that measure, one can argue that they are much more valuable to society.
Once again, the question becomes whether we live in luck village or effort village. If you think that the economy is a board game with a space that makes you a billionaire if you happen to land on it, then you resent the rich person’s luck. If you think that without Bezos there would be no powerful logistics system supporting online retail or that cloud computing would be nothing but an exotic niche, then you respect Amazon’s achievements.
Stephen Slivinski and Ryan Bourne review the recent Executive Order on housing.
Nick Gillespie remembers the late Brian Doherty.
Tyler Cowen remembers studying with Ludwig Lachmann.
Companies are already moving toward more automation, and this will speed up the process. An academic paper published last month shows how increases in minimum wages raise the likelihood of robot adoption in manufacturing. From 1992 to 2021, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage increased robot adoption by roughly 8 percent.
