President Joe Biden’s Labor Department recently announced a new rule that will permit money managers to play politics with trillions of dollars of people’s retirement savings.
The administration is pushing environmental, social and governance investing, which allows retirement fund managers to select stocks of companies based on their positions on social and environmental issues.
Put simply, retirement savings will be used as leverage to force companies to reduce their carbon emissions and establish racial and gender quotas and other social justice fads completely unrelated to securing a high return on workers’ lifetime savings.
For example, to reduce greenhouse gases, money managers have divested in traditional oil and gas companies such as Exxon or Chevron. How has that worked out so far? Last year, these were two of the highest-performing stocks.
Socially conscious investing has been around for decades. I have no problem with individual shareholders choosing stocks that comport with their personal values. I have friends, for example, who refuse to invest in Starbucks because the coffee company is fighting unionization by employees. Fine. It’s a free country.
But it’s an entirely different matter when trillion-dollar investment and retirement funds such as BlackRock inject their own biases into the way they invest people’s savings without their…
