On ESG & CBDC
Don't let the simple acronyms fool you. Today's Environmental, Social, and Governance movement seeks to redefine the corporation, while Central Bank Digital Currencies seek to redefine money.
I probably don’t raise the issue as often as I should in this forum, but tech policy has long been an area of professional focus. In a statement that should surprise no one who has paid attention to the analytic approaches I take to all areas of policy, my take on tech policy is nonstandard.
It was back in the 1990s that I first set out to understand what it means to live during the transition from the late industrial age to the early information age. I even wrote a couple of books about the interplay among new technologies, the businesses that deploy them, the laws that regulate those businesses, and the policy debates that reform those laws.
Digital Phoenix tied together what I like to call the first four front-page stories of the information age: The Internet Bubble, the Microsoft antitrust trial, the rise of Open Source Software, and the digital music wars. Believe it or not, I posited that the digital music wars would prove to be iconic: Understand the pattern of developments and tensions roiling that small industry as it moved into the information age, and you could predict the patterns of larger and more consequential tensions (i.e., as things like agriculture and education made that same transition).
The Secret Circuit explored the inner workings of a federal court with jurisdiction over the laws governing innovation, globalization, and government work. At the time, I described that court as high impact, low profile, and non-partisan.
Want more? You’ll have to read the books.
Point is, that when some folks I know asked me what I thought about a couple of today’s hot tech-related policy issues, I was hardly working in a vacuum.
Today on RealClearPolicy, I published a piece about ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance). I’ll cut to the chase: If you want to define a new type of “stakeholder” corporation that takes global responsibility seriously—and isn’t strictly beholden to shareholders and profits—go for it. By all means, redefine the corporation for the twenty-first century. But let’s not pretend that you’re the same sort of entity for which we developed corporate finance and corporate law. Why should a stakeholder corporation be entitled to presumption that made sense for shareholder corporations? No reason that I can see.
The second question that came my way concerned crypto, specifically CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies). This one has not yet led to a new publication. It didn’t have to, because I stand by what I said in Forbes a decade ago. At that point, when the question was whether Bitcoin was real, I said that it was important to differentiate between Bitcoin itself and the underlying blockchain technology. My read of history taught me that sovereigns guard two monopolies zealously: The right to wage war and the right to mint currency. I predicted that soon after crypto took off, the world’s governments would regulate independent cryptocurrencies out of existence and ensure that they alone could control digital currencies.
Enjoy these blasts from my past—and present.
Please subscribe to receive weekly installations of The American Spirit vs. The Great Awokening.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at The Coalition for America.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.