Kevin Williamson’s unhinged attack on Elizabeth Warren’s corporate accountability bill, explained
"CNBC talking heads explode over Sen. Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act"
I’m not sure he actually read it.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Updated Aug 17, 2018, 10:27am EDT
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As someone who tries to follow progressive policy development trends pretty closely, I was struck to see Thursday morning that Kevin Williamson had an article in National Review describing “Elizabeth Warren’s Batty Plan to Nationalize . . . Everything.”
Williamson turns out to be referring to Warren’s proposed Accountable Capitalism Act, which I wrote about on Wednesday and which does not involve nationalizing anything at all.
Her proposal would, in fact, be a large change in how the American economy works. And the impact of the change would almost certainly be negative for the 10 percent of the population that owns 80 percent of the value of the American stock market. So it’s natural that the plan will provoke intense opposition, and very much worth considering the possibility that it’s a bad idea.
But Williamson, whom every conservative I know regards as one of the movement’s top minds, reaches his conclusion based almost entirely on mischaracterizing Warren’s program.
She’s unveiling a bill to make corporate governance great again.
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Updated Aug 15, 2018, 11:05am EDT
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Elizabeth Warren has a big idea that challenges how the Democratic Party thinks about solving the problem of inequality.
Instead of advocating for expensive new social programs like free college or health care, she’s introducing a bill Wednesday, the Accountable Capitalism Act, that would redistribute trillions of dollars from rich executives and shareholders to the middle class — without costing a dime.
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The Accountable Capitalism Act — real citizenship for corporate persons
The conceit tying together Warren’s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths whose sole obligation is profitability — as is currently conventional in American business thinking.
Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.
The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades.
Business executives, like everyone else, want to have good reputations and be regarded as good people but, when pressed about topics of social concern, frequently fall back on the idea that their first obligation is to do what’s right for shareholders. A new charter would remove that crutch, and leave executives accountable as human beings for the rights and wrongs of their own decisions.
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