1\\ If you want to know who a society's thugs are, look what causes corporations willingly pay homage to. https://twitter.com/ZacBissonnette/status/1271266102358814726

2\\ In the US, annual reports now have long vacuous sections detailing vague commitments to vague climate causes

In Europe, there are picayune disclosures about gender representation (sometimes required)

In Africa, there are further disclosures about race

3\\ What's telling is that these are *legal* documents in which corporations see fit to make disclosures that are often not legally required.

This may seem a good thing: corporations donning the mantle of justice.

But it's actually bad!

4\\ Corporations are a useful abstraction because they unite costs and benefits in one entity, allowing society's limited resources to be optimally arranged to suit the values of individuals.

We don't *want* moral decisions to be made at the level of the corporation

5\\ We want moral decisions to be made at the level of individual consumers (or perhaps at the level of legislation), and then we want to unleash the profit motive to maximize prosperity within those moral constraints

6\\ So when corporations pay lip service to vague and contradictory "social justice" goals, it is a sign not only that resources are being poorly allocated, but that there exists a level of extrajudicial thuggery making property rights insecure

7\\ When General Mills tells you it is fighting for racial justice, or climate justice, or whatever, what it's really doing is blinking in Morse Code that it has been held hostage.

Economics and morality are separate realms. A free society *requires* that they remain separate.

8\\ Addendum: there are of course Natural Rights/Austrian/Libertarian schools of economic thought that hold free markets to be a moral necessity in themselves (and I concur). But I think the points in my thread still stand whether or not you take this stricter stance.