most deserving? Maybe it’s not a big deal right now. But the future always arrives faster than you think... And what’s wrong is wrong. I won’t pretend this is all the government’s fault, though... After all, Nasdaq is a private enterprise, not a government one. But it’s pushing the woke agenda, nonetheless. And apparently so is Vanguard, the massive investment management firm known for pioneering index funds. The Nasdaq proposal references a Vanguard report that says... We want companies that disclose the diversity makeup of their boards on dimensions such as gender, age, race, ethnicity, and national origin, at least on an aggregate basis. This is nothing less than a call to set the civil rights clock back to the 1950s and embed the scourge of racial and gender discrimination into corporate America. We should all oppose ideas like the Nasdaq proposal... We should shout loud and long until these people stop treating us like lab rats in a social engineering experiment. I know not everyone who reads this will agree with what I’m saying. But that doesn’t make what I said at the outset today any less true... The government’s monopoly on force should be used sparingly and judiciously... And it should only be used for carefully considered, very good reasons – not wantonly and carelessly to push bad ideas on unsuspecting shareholders.
And what have we seen in the pandemic? Sweeping restrictions imposed, for the most part, under statutes that confer enormous executive discretion. The SEC is a group of technocrats – and they’re all worthless... It had Bernie Madoff – one of the biggest fraudsters in history – delivered to it on a silver platter several times over a period of several years... But it never went after him. Its lack of action cost billions of dollars for investors... Madoff took $20 billion from investors and deceived them into believing he had made much more than that in investment returns. Yet less than $15 billion has been recovered and returned to investors. Meanwhile, the SEC routinely harasses short- sellers like David Einhorn and Bill Ackman for finding and betting against fraudulent companies. All for political correctness though, right? This is truly insane and will reap disastrous consequences... In capitalism, you don’t rise by exerting power through identity politics. You rise by showing competence and excellence in the workplace... Merit should be the only yardstick for appointing directors, the same as it should be for hiring anyone, in any job, anywhere. In the same way a lack of price discovery has made financial markets less valuable to investors, violently shoving woke politics on all of us will make it harder to know who is getting ahead by merit and who is just a slick political operator. How will we know who’s
American Consequences
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