The Patriot Post® · Schumer Flunks Capitalism 101

No one has ever accused Chuck Schumer of being the sharpest tool in the shed, and earlier this week we got another example of why.

On Tuesday, the New York Democrat and Senate majority leader penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Republicans Ought To Be All For ESG.” In it, he argued that the GOP, which has consistently railed against the Left’s woke agenda, should be all in favor of a Biden administration rule that allows (read: strongly suggests) retirement fund managers to consider environmental, social, and governance factors (read: woke CRT in business form) when making investments.

Huh?

Schumer begins by lamenting that House Republicans just passed a bill “that would reverse a Labor Department rule recognizing that retirement fiduciaries may use ESG when evaluating investments.”

What he fails to mention is that this “Labor Department rule” wasn’t a Labor Department rule at all until the hard-left, green-obsessed, equity-driven Biden administration made it a rule. Indeed, prior to last November, retirement fund managers behaved as retirement fund managers were supposed to behave: by only considering the fiduciary responsibility they have to those who’ve entrusted them with their retirement savings.

In other words, until Joe Biden came along, retirement fund managers were driven by a solemn duty to maximize the value of their investors’ financial nest eggs. The Biden rule turns this solemn duty on its head. It “allows” fund managers to favor investments in companies that aren’t performing as well as they might were they not committed to woke business practices — that is, business practices that prioritize environmental, social, and governance factors ahead of performance.

We should note that when a party in power “allows” businesses to engage in a certain behavior, that party is really strongly suggesting that businesses engage in said behavior. Nice investment firm ya got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.

So much for Schumer’s warped view of free market capitalism. What, exactly, is “free” or “capitalistic” about that sort of governmental coercion?

This isn’t some esoteric discussion, though. As Fox News’s Chad Pergram notes: “The investment rule fight is a proxy war for the GOP taking on liberals promoting environmental interests and social equality in investments. The Labor Department rule covers more than 150 million people who have collectively invested $12 trillion toward their retirements.”

As for the House-passed bill, Schumer says that he’ll “strongly oppose this ill-considered proposal” when it comes before the Senate. And, sure enough, it came before the Senate Wednesday and Schumer opposed it. But it wasn’t enough. Two of his colleagues — West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Montana’s Jon Tester, both of whom are up for reelection in their deep-red states in 2024 — sided with Republicans and helped block the Biden rule by a 50-46 vote. Biden promises to issue his first veto.

“Republicans,” Schumer railed, “talk about their love of the free market, small government and letting the private sector do its work. But their obsession with eliminating ESG would do the opposite, forcing their own views down the throats of every company and investor. Republicans would prevent investors from adapting to the future, for their own good and the good of the country.”

Nice try, Chuck.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who’s a leader in the anti-ESG movement, puts it this way in his new book, The Courage to Be Free: Florida’s Blueprint for American Revival: “ESG provides a pretext for CEOs to use shareholder assets to target issues like reducing the use of fossil fuels and restricting Second Amendment rights. It is, in effect, a way for the political left to achieve through corporate power what they cannot achieve at the ballot box.”

There’s that. And then there’s the idiocy of ESG-driven investments from a purely financial perspective. “Bloomberg tracked it,” said Indiana Republican Senator Mike Braun in a floor speech. “If you would actually invest according to ideology over the past few years, it would’ve been the difference between an 8.9% return and 6.3% return. Imagine trying to explain that in a way where someone trusted that you’d be doing the best thing with their hard-earned money to get the best financial return. That’s nearly a 30% cut in what you would have had otherwise. I’ve got to believe everybody would be thoroughly upset with that.”

So we ask those 150 million current and future retirees: Who would you rather entrust your $12 trillion to — Chuck “Capitalism for Dummies” Schumer, or the people whose business it is to maximize your retirement savings?

Need we even ask? As one wise Journal reader responded to Schumer’s op-ed: “The criteria impose artificial constraints on investment choices. Far from being a way to ‘let the market work,’ ESG in reality is the most recent version of the timeless game of ‘Other People’s Money.’”