But a few days ago, he published this Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal:

ESG is a pernicious strategy, because it allows the left to accomplish what it could never hope to achieve at the ballot box or through competition in the free market. ESG empowers an unelected cabal of bureaucrats, regulators and activist investors to rate companies based on their adherence to left-wing values.

While I do believe that some aspects of ESG are financial (climate change is a clear example), others seem to be more of an expression of moral value (and apparently at least some investors view it that way).  In that sense, it is an attempt to accomplish what cannot be achieved at the ballot box.  Some surveys show support for gun control measures that reach nearly 90%; a majority of Americans support greater action on climate change, and a majority want to keep abortion available under at least some circumstances.  Yet increasingly, our political leaders fail to adopt policies that the populace supports; the ballot box is simply not an available tool.  It’s no wonder, then, that voters turn to corporations as a source of power that at least appears to be more responsive to public pressure.  Far from a distortion of free markets, though, it is the ultimate expression of them, because the entire theory is that investment dollars can be used to force social change.  This is why Jonathan Macey calls the ESG movement “radically libertarian,” and the head of MSCI defended ESG as a mechanism to “protect capitalism. Otherwise, government intervention is going to come, socialist ideas are going to come.”

The best way to eliminate ESG, then, is to reform our political system to make it more responsive to voters.