Cult? What cult?
by Tom Sullivan
This week’s in-box brought news that one North Carolina Republican, Rep. Chuck McGrady, is re-introducing a bill to permit benefit corporations or B-corps in the state. It has failed to advance in past legislative sessions. B-corps, as I understand them, give directors legal protection for decisions that consider community stakeholders’ interests, not shareholders’ alone. Twenty-eight other states and the District of Columbia permit them:
Under current corporate law in North Carolina, corporations are not allowed to serve a purpose beyond maximizing profit for its shareholders. The North Carolina Benefit Corporation Act, however, would allow businesses to accomplish goals that go beyond the bottom line.
“It’s a for-profit entity that can do nonprofit work,” McGrady said. “They’ve got other purposes. They’re not all about the highest value for the stakeholders.”
The Horror.
Naturally, Randians hate the idea. In North Carolina, that means the Art Pope-sponsored Civitas Institute. The idea that people might invest in business for reasons other than maximizing personal wealth is blasphemy:
For starters, the underlying premise of creating a “benefit corporation” is that traditional corporations and companies don’t benefit the public. This notion, of course, is ludicrous. As Francis DeLuca noted in the 2011 Bad Bill summary: “A lawful, profitable business, by its very existence, already ‘benefits’ society…A business, by making a profit, increases the wealth of society and hence the ability of individuals to find employment and increase their standard of living. They also provide products and services that make our lives better.”
Civitas argues, “We do not need government to designate some business as better than others.” Because for Randians, laissez-faire capitalism is a self-contained system of morality whereby pursuit of self-interest is, in and of itself, the highest good. Anything other is less, not better. The idea that someone might want to invest in business for mixed personal and altruistic reasons, one supposes, is a kind of economic miscegenation, and by definition unclean. (Translation: benefit corporations have cooties.)
That’s not at all cult-like, is it?
The T-Party hates benefit corporations for its own reasons. Like Agenda 21:
This initiative is a part of the overall Agenda 21 program. It is a push to convey greater and greater control by government over private enterprise and private property. The longer term objective is to reduce private control over property and commerce, moving the United States toward facism and socialism.
Cold Warriors never die. They just see new -isms hiding in new woodpiles.