late stage legal plunder
late stage legal plunder
explorations of the ESG/DEI crony corporatist grift
consider the possibility that most of what is currently going on in the world today is not about social movements but rather about metastasizing legal plunder as it becomes the predominant business model of “big business” as enabled by “big government.”
as we engage in such considerations several salients should be kept in mind as they form the evolutionary drivers of this emergent system:
big business is no fan of free markets and never will be. big business is a fan of staying big and the best way to do so is not to invite competition but to quash it. they seek not to create markets governed by consumer sovereignty bur rather to bet on sure things mandated by edict and regulation. politicians and legalism are always the tools for this.
gato’s first law tells us: “as soon as you allow politicians to determine that which is bought or sold, the first thing bought and sold will always be politicians.” this law remains undefeated in predictive power.
gato’s postulate (admittedly a more speculative proposition but one rapidly gaining heft and evincing prognostigatory power) asserts that “a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube.” you can read its derivation HERE. it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that we have not wound up with government where the people running the scam not only have no conception that they are running a scam but have subsumed their entire identities into it. they are made dangerous by their encyclopedic ignorance of how anything actually works and their determined belief that the echo-chambers they inhabit are consensus reality.
these are really the only 3 things one needs to understand in order to grasp the current flow of events and as i will argue, most of the social movements attached to it are essentially ancillary and incidental. they are more cause than effect, more marketing arm than economic or historical driver.
this feeds the engine of legal plunder by a public/private partnership of aspiring oligopolists cum aristocrats that has come to dominate not only the economic sphere but has designs on the social and purported moral spheres as well as the latter two cement the former one in place.
most of those swept up in it are more useful idiot than brave reformer. they have been gulled into acceptance of these absurdist and life altering precepts not by ethicists but rather by profiteers seeking durable advantage by abrogating a free market.
and they have their acolytes turned inside out and wrong way round.
it’s really quite stark when one steps back to look at it.
this is not societal evolution, it’s a business model.
and business has been booming.
i’d like to start with two quotes from Frédéric Bastiat perhaps the most prescient economist ever to write in order to define the term “legal plunder”
How to Identify Legal Plunder
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law -- which may be an isolated case -- is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
add to this the following:
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
and truly it may be said that frederic saw the whole of the field and that nothing whatsoever has changed since early 1800’s when this was written.
it is, perhaps, singularly apropos today as it was written so shortly after the french revolution against the intensely evolved system of legal plunder, monopoly, and aristocratic privilege that drove the gauls to storm the bastille: for we are very much there again.
an increasingly unified front of state and big business whose revolving doors of staffing and funding spin so rapidly as to blur the vision have come not just to prominence but full dominance of the economic and increasingly the social spheres and the faux moralizing to support this crony corporatist and totalitarian edifice is now in full bloom and stands on unselfconscious display.
this is the stage where they stop trying to hide their thumbs upon the scales and start trying to portray such manipulation as not only virtuous but vital. they have become privateers demanding those they prey upon be thankful for having been pirated because it serves some manufactured conception of the public good.
and this is anathema to the health of a free society and a free people.
let’s look:
this is what it looks like when those seeking self-advancement attempt to turn legal plunder into a self-justifying moral system:
behaviors are going to have to change.
you have to force behavior.
at black rock, we are forcing behaviors.
this is not subtle stuff. this is the precise and perfect instantiation of erecting “a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
and no one is hiding it. because that’s not what you do once you presume to have the law captured. you go big and loud and proclaim the moral rightness and inevitability of your aristocracy.
and the veritable thieves’ forest of grifter politicians and the true believers that once followed in their wake but now increasingly constitute the political vanguard then go forth to make it so. this is their religion and polestar. and they have no idea they are stooges.
they have mistake useful idiocy for being a progressive social movement.
the grifts like “buying up all the HVAC companies then mandating air filter and heat pump upgrades” were bad enough. but now they want to make you eat bugs and thank them for it and anyone who wants to have affordable, reliable electricity instead of overpriced and wobbly “renewables” (many of which are nothing of the sort) gets hectored as a villain and a world killer and an enemy of this new collective edifice of economic and societal dictation.
they have been making their move to become the entrenched and unsupplantable economic and political power with the fervor and aggression of medieval popes.
it no accident that this is suddenly everywhere. this is civilizational blitzkrieg.
(former AB exec Anson Frericks) said BlackRock, Vanguard, and another firm, State Street, manage about $20 trillion in capital and use their clout to promote agenda politics being pushed on them by progressive lawmakers overseeing government pension funds that the companies profit from.
One of the firms manages California’s pension fund — the largest in the country — and California politicians can have a big say in the corporate governance and politicking of the firms they invest so heavily in, he added.
“In California, for example, they recently have mandated those large pension funds that they divest from things like fossil fuels and oil and gas, and then when Bill de Blasio, [former] mayor of New York, was there, he did the same thing,” he said.
“But they also tell BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard if they’re going to manage their money, they have to commit to things like ESG — diversity, equity, inclusion — and adopt firm-wide commitments that they therefore then force onto all the major companies in corporate America.”
this is how the merry go round works. these mandates create huge business opportunities for the big funds and exclude those who don’t play ball and the big funds and banks push to elect politicians that support this sort of demand and fully embrace the ideologies that glorify it as “societal need” and “stakeholder capitalism.”
but stakeholder capitalism is really just grift and cemented aristocracy. it’s a way to demand outcomes other than those the free market values and thereby hamstring competition, innovation, and human flourishing by short circuiting the potential for the schumpeterian destruction that is the revitalizing lifeblood of economies and societies alike.
instead they seek to bury progress beneath an artificial system of self serving pseudo-ethics that seek not virtue but the MBA equivalent of the divine right of kings.
it’s a grotesquerie of grabby grifters and the legions of useful idiots they have indoctrinated and unleashed to extol the virtues of this new regime of “compliance to central diktat for your own good” which is being so widely mistaken for moral code are as oblivious as they are odious.
but it’s falling apart. the simple fact is that outside of small groups of the brownest of brownshirts, this transition from grifter to moralist is not going to fly. it’s far too precarious and reality begins to assert itself as people vote with their feet and with their wallets.
the MLB only lasted one day on this “go woke go broke” suicide mission before reverting amidst massive uprising.
anheuser bush is seeing sales collapse.
target has been targeted.
this is america and we do not want an aristocracy, especially not one rooted on manipulative madness.
we do not want our cultural choices and touchstones weaponized into political cudgels with which to bludgeon us into being the captured consumers an oligopoly requires to enable it to avoid competing in free markets as it bets upon sure things like “mandates.”
we wish to derive and live by our own morality and rights, not those force fed by those whose power it entrenches.
this ersatz secular religion is as morally bankrupt as it is humanisticaly bleak.
and more and more, those that this most unrepresentative of movements seeks to “mascot” through their attestations of alliance have had more then enough.
i’m a friendly gato and my friend group comprises a conspicuously big tent. they comprise many races, black, white, yellow, brown. they are gay and straight, male and female, rich and poor, educated and not. and i support them all. they are my friends and they are good people.
and they are all starting to stand as one and say “you do not speak for me. i am not your mascot and all this endless and over-avid “championing” is pissing me off. cease your performance and go away.”
this fusillade has grown so fulsome that none save the most histrionic of zealots still want to sing along. for most, it has become an embarrassment.
they just want to be hispanic or gay or female people. but they want to be people first. i hear over and over how exhausted and alienated these outlandish, extremist mascot movements are making most of those they purport to stand for.
and this is how the worm turns.
this has gone much too far and our civilizational substrate is rebounding to throw off that which is noxious to it.
america was founded to oppose aristocracy.
we threw one off once and we WILL do so again.
common sense and common decency demand it of us.
and so let us ensure that crony corporatism cum fascist fiefdom and all the “woke” and ESG justified diktat driven economy and made up morality that it drags behind like some sort of befouled tail is driven once more from these shores.
it’s time it went broke.
i generally dislike the politicization of commerce, but today such a course seems needful.
and make no mistake, this is hitting them where it hurts.
vote with your feet, vote with your wallets.
disavow and defund those who push mandates and moralizing mercantilism.
stand with those who stand with us.
who shall prosper hinges upon our patronage.
so let us starve these noxious beasts and reclaim for we the people our lives an livelihoods.
it is time.
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