“We’re seeing a tremendous amount of competition,” John Lawler, Ford vice chair and CFO, told journalists in a conference call. “In fact, S&P Global … said that there’s about 143 EVs in the pipeline right now for North America — and most of those are two-row and three-row SUVs.”

The news that Ford was scrapping its SUV EV came just a month after the company announced a manufacturing pivot at its plant in Oakville, Ontario. The plant, which had been earmarked for EV production, was shifting production to Ford’s F-series pickups, its flagship gas-powered trucks.

“The move,” the New York Times reported, “is the latest example of how automakers are pulling back on aggressive investment plans in response to the slowing growth of electric vehicle sales.”

The Cost Problem

Ford’s latest pullback from EVs is no surprise to people who’ve been paying attention to the EV market.

More than a year ago I pointed out that news outlets were reporting of EVs “piling up” at dealership lots because of low consumer demand, which ultimately prompted Ford to halve production of its popular F-150 Lightning, reducing output to about 1,600 vehicles per week.

The reality is both lawmakers and Washington and auto companies severely misjudged consumer demand for EVs, which has proven far lower than estimates had projected. There are many reasons for the low demand, but the primary reasons are concerns consumers have with EVs.

Price is one factor. Research in recent years has indicated that despite government subsidies, EVs typically cost on average between $5,000 and $10,000 more than a similar gas-powered vehicle. That EVs are more expensive than gas-powered cars may surprise few readers, but what’s less known is that the price gap is widening.

“EV prices aren’t just going up; they are rising faster than inflation…faster than [internal combustion engine] vehicle prices” Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, testified before Congress in 2023, noting that the inflation-adjusted average price of a new EV had risen to over $66,000 in 2022, compared to $44,000 in 2011.

The Charging Problem

Cost, however, isn’t the only concern of consumers.

An overwhelming percentage of Americans—77 percent, according to a 2023 survey led by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago—have concerns about how they would charge an EV if they bought one.

These concerns are not baseless. In February, the New York Times profiled a man Michael Puglia who had recently bought a Ford F-150 Lightning and said it was the “coolest” vehicle he’d ever owned.

“It’s unbelievably fast and responsive,” the Ann Arbor, Mich., anesthesiologist told reporter Neal E. Boudette. “The technology is amazing.”

The problem was the vehicle’s range. When the weather grew colder, Puglia found that the distance his vehicle could travel fell dramatically. His faith in the $79,000 truck dampened, and he found himself wondering if he should sell it.

“People say ‘range anxiety’ — it’s like it’s the driver’s fault,” Puglia told the Times. “But it’s not our fault. It’s actually they’re not telling us what the real range is. The truck says it’s 300 miles. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that.”

The range problem of electric vehicles is exacerbated by another challenge facing EVs: a lack of charging stations. Nationwide, there was 68,475 private and public charging stations at the beginning of the year, according to the Department of Energy. That’s more than twice the number in 2020, but it’s still just a third of the number of gas stations and far below projections.

The range problem of electric vehicles is exacerbated by another challenge facing EVs: a lack of charging stations. Nationwide, there was 68,475 private and public charging stations at the beginning of the year, according to the Department of Energy. That’s more than twice the number in 2020, but it’s still just a third of the number of gas stations and far below projections.

One reason charging infrastructure has lagged is due to the federal government’s incompetence. Nearly three years ago, the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Energy announced a $5 billion spending effort to build fleets of charging stations to lead “an electric vehicle revolution.” As of the summer of 2024, just seven charging stations had been built.

“That is pathetic,” said US Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. “We’re now three years into this … That is a vast administrative failure.”

Of Profits, and Losses

The decision of automakers to bet big on EV adoption was in some ways rational, in that they were responding to powers in Washington that were pressuring them and incentivizing them to expand electrical vehicle production. But the costs of listening to industry experts and politicians in Washington instead of consumers — and profits — have been severe.

In August 2023, NPR reported that Ford CEO Jim Farley was charging ahead with its ambitious EV expansion even though the company was “losing money on each EV it sells” and consumer demand for EVs was plummeting. Farley’s reasoning was that Ford was attracting new customers, but it was a costly endeavor. Ford reported a loss of $4.7 billion on EV sales in 2023, roughly $40,525 per vehicle sold.

“If the great mass of consumers dislike purple cars with green polka dots, then a society based on private property will not waste resources in the production of such odd cars,” wrote economist Robert Murphy. “Any eccentric producer who flouted the wishes of his customers and churned out vehicles to suit his idiosyncratic tastes, would soon go out of business.”

Murphy wrote these words more than twenty years ago, but in a sense they describe Ford’s business strategy. By producing mass amounts of pricey EVs that consumers didn’t want and selling them at a loss, Ford was in a sense cranking out green polka dotted cars. It was a losing strategy and path to going out of business.

Ford’s massive pullback from EVs is part of a broader return to economic reality. Companies flourish in a free market economy not by serving bureaucrats but consumers, the true “bosses.”

“They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants,” Mises wrote. “They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser.”

Automakers bear responsibility for their decision, and paid the price in the form of losses. But this misallocation of resources likely could have been avoided if not for the federal government’s hamfisted attempts to coerce Americans into EVs, which included not just taxpayer-funded subsidies, but overt pressure from Washington and federal regulations designed to phase-out gas-powered cars.

Fortunately, the centrally planned EV revolution now appears dead in the water, or at least in full retreat. A spokesman for Kamala Harris recently told Axios the presidential candidate “does not support an electric vehicle mandate.”

Forcing Americans into EVs was always a bad idea economically, but it now appears to be a bad idea politically, too.

That’s good news for Ford and American consumers.

In what the paper called “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is mandating that a majority of new passenger vehicles sold in America be hybrids or EVs by 2032.

The Biden administration and defenders of the policy argue that the EPA’s regulation is “not a ban” on gas-powered cars, since carmakers are not prohibited from producing gas-powered vehicles. Instead, automakers are required to meet a government-mandated “average emissions limit” across their entire vehicle line, to force them to produce more EVs and fewer gas-powered cars.

It’s a clever ruse in that it allows the Biden administration to use regulatory power to force automobile manufactures off of gas-powered vehicles while denying that they are banning them.

Whatever one chooses to call the regulation, its purpose is clear.

“Make no mistake,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars.”

This might be music to the ears of those who see fossil fuels as evil, but economics and history suggest the White House’s plan to force Americans off of gas-powered cars could be a disaster.

What’s Holding Up EV Adoption?

A major reason why the White House is forcing this “transformation of the American automobile market” is that Americans aren’t voluntarily adopting EVs quickly enough to satisfy the White House.

Though Americans purchased more than a million EVs last year, that still represents less than 8 percent of total vehicle sales in the US. The government’s current target is 56 percent. (If the White House was serious about speeding up this transition, it might consider eliminating the 25 percent tariff on cars built in China — which accounts for some 60 percent of global EV sales — but that would be too easy.)

Despite massive subsidies encouraging consumers to purchase EVs, Americans didn’t buy them as rapidly as predicted, causing auto companies to pump the brakes. Ford recently announced it was halving production of its most popular EV, the F-150 Lightning. General Motors, the largest US automaker, and Toyota, the second-largest US automaker, followed suit, announcing significant reductions in EV production.

The weak demand for electric vehicles no doubt has several sources, but the BBC identified a few primary reasons, two of which appear over and over in consumer surveys: price and charging reliability.

Ford’s F-150 Lightning starts at $50,000. Its popular Mach-e starts at $40,000, and that’s after a recent $8,100 mark-down. GM’s top-selling EV, the LYRIQ, starts at $59,000. On average, EVs sell for about $5,000 more than similar gas-powered cars. And EV prices are going up, not down, researchers point out.

“In 2011, the inflation-adjusted price of a new EV was near $44,000. By 2022, that price had risen to over $66,000,” said Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in her testimony to Congress in 2023.

The second problem is that Americans have serious concerns about how they’ll charge their EVs. A 2023 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that 77 percent of respondents cited concerns about charging stations as a reason for not purchasing an EV.

This is not an irrational concern.

When Americans drive their gas-powered cars, they are not worried about where they’ll fill up when their fuel runs low. Gas stations are plentiful in the US and easy to find. Charging stations are another matter.

Bloomberg reported last year that, despite steady growth in recent years of EV charging stations, there is just one quick-turn electrical vehicle charge station in the US for every 16 gasoline stations.

Federal efforts to expand charging infrastructure, including $7.5 billion in new spending to build half a million stations, have been embarrassingly slow.

‘Subsidizing EVs With Profits From Gas-Powered Cars’

Since Americans are not voluntarily adopting EVs as quickly as the government would like, the EPA is trying to hasten the transition. This could be a disastrous move.

As the Journal noted, Ford last year lost nearly $5 billion on its EV business. Yet the company still managed to generate a $4.3 billion profit in 2023. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce how this happened.

“[Automobile] companies are heavily subsidizing EVs with profits from gas-powered cars,” the Journal notes.

Forcing automobile companies to expand production of their least-profitable product lines at the expense of their best-performing ones is economic madness. It calls to mind collectivized agricultural policies in the Soviet Union, where central planners embraced the worst farming methods.

While Stalin’s collectivization of farms in 1929 was a massive failure that led to the deaths of millions, agriculture in the USSR of course continued during and after his lifetime. But two distinct sectors emerged: a tiny private sector that produced a bumper crop of food, and a massive collectivized sector that produced very little.

The late economist James D. Gwartney (1940–2024) explained that families living on collectives in the USSR were allowed to farm on small private plots (no more than one acre) and sell their produce in a mostly free market.

Historians point out that in the 1960s these tiny private farms, which accounted for just 3 percent of the sown land in the USSR, produced 66 percent of its eggs, 64 percent of the potatoes, 43 percent of its vegetables, 40 percent of meat, and 39 percent of its milk.

Gwartney and economist Richard Lyndell Stroup note that by 1980, private farms accounted for just one percent of sown land in the USSR, but a quarter of its agricultural output.

“The productivity per acre on the private plots was approximately 33 times higher than that on the collectively farmed land!” they wrote.

In a free-market economy, farmers within the Soviet Union would have been allowed to shift toward private production — just like US automakers today would be allowed to shift away from EVs until the industry becomes more profitable.

But… the Environment?

Supporters of the Biden policy are likely to respond that we have no choice but to transition to EVs because of climate change. There are several problems with this argument.

For starters, EVs are not the green panacea they seem to be. Electrical vehicles actually require a massive amount of energy and strip mining. Half a million pounds of rock and minerals have to be mined to build just one battery, on average. EVs require far more energy and cause far more pollution when they are manufactured than gas-powered automobiles.

“[I]t’s true that the production of a BEV (battery electric vehicle) causes more pollution than a gasoline-powered counterpart,” the New York Times admitted in a 2022 article headlined “EVs Start With a Bigger Carbon Footprint. But That Doesn’t Last.”

If you weren’t aware that EVs cause more pollution on the production side than gas-powered cars, don’t be embarrassed; few do. It’s one of the dirty secrets of EVs: they start with an enormous carbon footprint. At a climate summit a few years ago, Volvo noted its C40 Recharge had to be driven about 70,000 miles before its total carbon footprint was smaller than the gas-powered version.

As the Times says, the footprint of EVs shrinks over time. But not as fast as many think. One big reason for this is that the bulk of the electricity produced in the US is produced by… you guessed it… fossil fuels. As the Energy Information Administration points out, fossil fuels generate about 60 percent of the electricity in the US, which means that most people charging their EVs are using electricity generated from fossil fuels.

Reducing that carbon footprint is also exacerbated by the fact that people tend to rack up fewer miles with EVs than gas-powered vehicles, which makes it more difficult to offset the large carbon footprint on the production side.

“[Our] data show that electric vehicles are driven considerably less on average than gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles,” researchers at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley noted in a 2019 study. “In the complete sample, electric vehicles are driven an average of 7,000 miles per year, compared to 10,200 for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.”

All of this helps explain why a 2023 Wall Street Journal analysis found that shifting all personal US vehicles to electric power would barely make a dent in global CO2 emissions, reducing them by less than 0.2 percent.

Who Chooses?

Forcing US automakers to expand their least-profitable autolines is backward economics. It puts automakers at risk, not to mention their workers and shareholders.

The higher profits automakers are reaping from gas-powered vehicles isn’t an accident. It’s a signal that consumers prefer them at the prices being offered, and heeding consumers is what separates capitalism from the failed collectivist systems of the past.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that in a free-market economy, it’s the consumers who ultimately call the shots, not the state or even the corporations. This idea is known as consumer sovereignty.

“The real bosses [under capitalism] are the consumers,” Mises wrote in Bureaucracy. “They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”

The real question here isn’t about which is better, gas-powered cars or EVs. It’s about who gets to choose.

By allowing unelected regulators to decide what kind of cars are built instead of consumers, the US is crossing an ominous line.

This kind of central planning failed miserably in the 20th century. Don’t expect it to be any different this time around.

“If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” YouTube said in a statement.

Mr. Brand, a former self-confessed sex addict, was accused of sexual and emotional abuse that allegedly took place several years ago by four women in an investigation by the Times of London, The Sunday Times, and Channel 4 “Dispatches.”

The 48-year-old actor denied the charges in a video he shared with his 6.6 million YouTube followers over the weekend.

“These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I’ve written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous,” Mr. Brand said. “Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.”

A day after the allegations were reported, police in the UK said they had received a report of a sexual assault allegedly involving Mr. Brand in September 2003.

The Rise of Financial Deplatforming

The accusations against Mr. Brand are serious, and could eventually lead to criminal charges, both in the United States and the UK. But at this point, they’re just that: accusations. This is one of the problems with #MeToo trials in the court of public opinion. The accused are presumed guilty and prematurely punished.

Consider another celebrity who famously found himself accused: Johnny Depp. In 2018, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” star was summarily dropped by Disney following accusations of domestic violence made by his ex-wife, Amber Heard. It didn’t matter that Mr. Depp said the allegations were untrue, or that he had served without incident for more than a decade as the lead actor in a franchise that had generated more than $3 billion for Disney.

Though nearly ruined, Mr. Depp would go on to win a defamation suit against Ms. Heard, receiving a multi-million-dollar settlement. (The actor appears to have taken Disney’s betrayal personally, evidenced by his decision to not return to the popular “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise.)

YouTube and Disney, of course, have the right to associate with whomever they choose, but taking actions that destroy people’s livelihoods on mere accusations is a serious business, one that creates a dangerous incentive.

In her new book You Will Own Nothing, the bestselling author Carol Roth writes of a new financial world that’s emerging in which governments and corporations increasingly decide what behaviors are good and what behaviors are bad.

While the First Amendment prohibits the government from taking criminal actions against people for sharing “bad” opinions, the government can encourage corporations to take direct actions against citizens that inflict serious social and—more importantly—financial harm.

YouTube demonetization, which is relatively common, is just one example. Bank account deplatforming, a method that’s increasingly common in the United States and Canada, is another.

“Financial deplatforming, or banking censorship, will be a common lever governments and companies reach for when it comes to censorship of political opinions,” said Annelise Butler in a 2022 Heritage Foundation article.

Ms. Butler said companies acquiescing to government requests to demonetize and censor users are “mirroring those of China’s social credit system.”

Interestingly Ms. Roth makes the same comparison in “You Will Own Nothing,” adding that she would have laughed off such a thing 10 years ago.

“Given that we are so close to social credit, with the social acceptance of moral judgment outside the legal system and the technical means to collect and analyze information at scale, the Chinese system provides a frightening road map,” Ms. Roth wrote.

This is what makes the government’s incestuous relationship with Big Tech and other companies so dangerous. Government officials can lean on companies to coerce them to punish dissent and Wrongthink, something it has done with great enthusiasm.

None of this is to say Russell Brand is guilty or innocent of the accusations against him, of course. We don’t know.

What we do know is that during the pandemic, Mr. Brand emerged as one of the leading voices against the government’s COVID regime, and he later became one of the most outspoken anti-war voices on YouTube. (We also know the FBI has a long history of using sexual indiscretions to control and silence powerful people.)

Protecting Its Own Interests

There’s no evidence that Mr. Brand, who managed to survive the 2017 #MeToo movement with his reputation intact despite his promiscuous history, became a target for his outspoken views. But the Twitter Files revealed that both the White House and federal agencies spent considerable effort and resources attempting to influence social media companies to shape public opinion and silence critics of government policies.

In some cases, individual influencers were targeted, including independent journalist Alex Berenson, who is suing President Joe Biden and Pfizer executives who, according to his lawsuit (pdf), “specifically targeted Mr. Berenson for removal. The conspirators did not simply ask Twitter to remove a specific post Mr. Berenson made. Rather they pushed Twitter to ban him entirely, an unconstitutional prior restraint on his speech.”

This shows the great lengths the state will go to to punish those who threaten their agendas, something the economist Murray Rothbard once observed, noting that the state inherently is an institution “largely interested in protecting itself rather than its subjects.”

All of this is made possible by the state’s expanding influence over Big Tech and the centralization of the global financial system.

Mr. Brand’s case shows that mere accusations are all it takes to leave someone suddenly demonetized.

“This is the informal social credit system that I talked about in ‘You Will Own Nothing’, coming after your sources of income at their discretion,” Ms. Roth wrote on X following Mr. Brand’s demonetization. “You are not ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in the big tech sphere or the court of public opinion.”

What few seem to realize is that this is likely a feature of the emerging financial order, not a bug.

About the Author

Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at the Foundation for Economic Education.

The first part of Sagan’s warning touched on humanity’s growing ignorance of science, which Sagan attributed largely to the failure of modern schools. Sagan saw this as a clear danger to humanity, especially in a society built on science and technology.

The second part of Sagan’s warning was even more profound. The University of Chicago-trained astrophysicist pointed out that science is not simply “a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking,” one based on skepticism and questioning. It was imperative, he said, not just that people be educated in the sciences and grounded in healthy skepticism, but that people be allowed to question and challenge those in authority.

“If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.

…It’s a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution and the Bill or Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run the government, the government runs us.”

Covid and the Corruption of Science

Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.

This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community.” Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party.”

First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.

Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.

“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.

People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science.”

This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.

“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”

Even more importantly, however, to shut down discussion and censor political opponents is the antithesis of the spirit of science, which has experienced major breakthroughs only by challenging and tearing down previously accepted scientific assumptions and orthodoxies.

Carl Sagan understood this, which is why he said it was so important to “ask skeptical questions” and “to be skeptical of those in authority.”

If we fail to do this, or if we are not allowed to do this, Sagan warned what will happen: we will no longer be running the government; the government will be running us.

This article originally appeared on the author’s Substack.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

As most people already know, the world’s most popular light lager has seen a collapse in sales following a boycott prompted by a March Madness ad campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. The Journal’s chart depicting the fall in Bud Light sales speaks for itself, and the company’s delayed and tepid response to the uproar only seemed to make matters worse.

WSJ chart showing Bud Light's collapse after celebrating "day 365 of girlhood."https://t.co/2IcoNG8uQT pic.twitter.com/rdETbA0Bnl

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) May 22, 2023

This isn’t Anheuser-Busch’s first foray into controversial social issues.

The Journal’s Jennifer Maloney points out that the company has been engaging in social equity-themed advertising for years, including a 2021 Michelob Ultra ad featuring transgender track star Cecé Telfer and a 2022 Bud Light Canada campaign for Pride Month displaying various pronouns .

What Maloney fails to mention in her article is why beer companies — not just Bud Light — are suddenly courting controversial social issues such as nonbinary gender, transgenderism, and third-wave feminism.

The answer is simple: The rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance as the dominant strain of “stakeholder capitalism” has incentivized corporations to curry favor with ESG rating firms , even if it means alienating their consumers.

Unlike traditional capitalism, which seeks to maximize profits by serving consumers, the ESG model seeks to “improve” capitalism by considering other stakeholders besides investors and consumers. Publicly traded corporations are graded on how well they achieve socially desirable metrics, such as combating climate change, advancing diversity and inclusion, and creating a more “equitable” society.

What was intended to be a kinder, gentler form of capitalism has morphed into a kind of economic fascism that places the arbitrary interests of a small cabal of people — asset managers, bureaucrats, global financiers — ahead of consumers.

As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out , consumers are the true bosses in a capitalist system. They ultimately decide what products are created and purchased, who becomes wealthy, and who becomes poor.

As the Bud Light fiasco shows, ESG places consumers in the back seat. The social equity campaigns are not designed to appeal to Bud Light consumers, but to the ESG rating agencies, which have the power to downgrade companies that fail to dance to their tune.

This is a great deal for the ESG puppeteers. They can make multi-billion corporations move by the mere threat of a bad score, which gives them immense economic and political power.

Elon Musk found this out when Tesla was kicked off the S&P 500 ESG Index in May 2022, even though Tesla is an icon of sustainability. By January, Tesla’s stock, which had been trading at $248 a share, had fallen by roughly 55%.

To what extent Tesla’s collapse in share price stemmed from the company getting booted from the index is unclear, but the point is mostly moot. What matters is the threat of being singled out for an ESG transgression.

What few people seem to realize is that Bud Light’s collapse in sales is not just a threat to Anheuser-Busch. It’s a threat to the entire ESG model.

Up until this point, ESG has thrived because the perceived costs of not participating outweighed the costs of participating. Bud Light’s implosion stands to change that perception, which is precisely why the ESG overlords are striking back.

On Friday, USA Today published a leaked letter showing the Human Rights Campaign had informed Anheuser-Busch “that it has suspended its Corporate Equality Index score — a tool that scores companies on their policies for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees.”

“Anheuser-Busch had a key moment to really stand up and demonstrate the importance of their values of diversity, equity, and inclusion and their response really fell short,” said Eric Bloem, HRC’s senior director.

One can almost feel bad for Bud Light. The brand is caught in the middle of a larger war being fought by global anti-capitalists and the bosses of capitalism: consumers. Publicly traded companies should be allowed to go back to serving their real bosses — consumers — which is why the rotten ESG model should be dismantled.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

“Hold my beer, Budweiser! Miller Lite’s new feminist spokeswoman is here to cuss at you and explain why men are evil,” wrote Not the Bee.

“Miller Lite apparently wants the Bud Light boycott treatment too,” said Rogan O’Handley, a Hollywood lawyer turned conservative commentator and supporter of former President Donald Trump. “Newsflash: After a hard day’s work, working-class beer drinkers don’t want to be lectured like they’re in a gender studies class at SUNY-Oswego.”

The ad features Ilana Glazer, a comedian who claimed women were the first brewers in history but were betrayed by corporate America.

“From Mesopotamia to the Middle Ages to colonial America, women were the ones doing the brewing,” Glazer said. “Centuries later, how did the industry pay homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis.”

To make amends, Miller Lite is buying up vintage ad art featuring women in swimwear, which it will turn into compost to support female brewers. “That good s*** helps farmers grow quality hops,” one woman explains.

Many accused Miller Lite of following the “woke” path of Bud Light, which witnessed a collapse in sales following a March Madness ad campaign featuring transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney that prompted Anheuser-Busch to issue an apology .

“We never intended to be part of a discussion that divides people,” wrote CEO Brendan Whitworth.

What many on social media failed to realize is that Miller Lite’s ad was released before Bud Light’s implosion. It had just received little attention. It’s not clear if Miller Lite’s ad will have the same effect on beer sales as Bud Light’s. Some commentators on Twitter said they appreciated the ad.

“I actually think that Miller Lite got it a lot more right than Bud Lite in how it approached a female demo,” wrote Emily Zanotti of Fox News.

That’s the nature of commercials, of course. They are subjective. What might make one person feel uncomfortable might appeal to someone else.

I’m apparently a Neanderthal who likes the old-school Miller Lite commercials, whether they feature women in bikinis or Bob Uecker masquerading as Rodney Dangerfield at a costume party. I don’t like feeling lectured. That’s just me.

People naturally have different preferences and tastes in commercials, and that’s OK. The thing is, I’m actually Miller Lite’s target demo: a 40-something male beer drinker.

This invites questions. Why are Bud Light and Miller Lite making commercials that alienate their own consumer base? More importantly, why are they wading into controversial matters such as transgenderism, third-wave feminism, and nonbinary gender at all?

The primary answer is the rise of environmental, social, and corporate governance, a term coined during a 2004 United Nations initiative (“ Who Cares Wins ”) that grades companies on social performance.

ESG was born from the idea that traditional capitalism needs to be replaced with a more caring, socially conscious capitalism that serves other “stakeholders.” And what started as “guidelines and recommendations” have become explicit standards set by ESG rating agencies that impose steep costs on publicly traded companies, especially those that don’t comply.

The thing is, companies are not jazzed about having to dance to the tune of a small cabal of central bankers and asset managers. A 2022 CNBC survey showed that while executives support ESG publicly, privately, they harbor serious concerns. Yet not playing ball is not an option.

“If a company has to do disclosures, and it has some executives who are ‘not into ESG,’ it should be thinking about the cost of not becoming more concerned,” Eileen Murray, a former executive of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, told CNBC .

Miller Lite and Bud Light drinkers have every right to be annoyed by ads they don’t like. But they should understand these publicly traded companies are playing a balancing act on who they risk alienating, their consumers or ESG puppeteers.

This article was republished with permission from the Washington Examiner.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The 27-year old NBA star won a championship with the Golden State Warriors, was selected to his first All-Star game, and is looking to ink a contract extension that could pay him $180 million over the next five years.

But when Wiggins was interviewed by reporters on Tuesday, he said there was one thing that is still bothering him.

“I still wish I didn’t get [vaccinated], to be honest with you,” Wiggins told FanSided when asked about his decision. “But you gotta do what you gotta do.”

Wiggins, like Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving, had reservations about getting vaccinated against COVID-19. But unlike Irving, who missed much of the regular season because he declined to get vaccinated, Wiggins opted to acquiesce and get the shot.

“I did it, and I was an All-Star this year and champion, so that was the good part, just not missing out on the year, the best year of my career,” Wiggins said.

As for the bad part, Wiggins doesn’t mention any adverse reaction from the vaccine. His primary beef appears to be that he was essentially forced to receive an injection of something he didn’t quite trust.

“I just don’t like putting all that stuff in my body, so I didn’t like that,” Wiggins said, “and I didn’t like that it wasn’t my choice. I didn’t like that it was either get this or don’t play.”

‘An Act Must Be Free’

Economists often talk about the importance of individual choice from a market perspective.

Every day, humans make thousands of decisions—big and small, consciously and subconsciously—that affect their lives and the world around them. Rational choice theory suggests that individuals “tend to make rational choices and achieve outcomes that are aligned with their own personal objectives,” which tends to lead to individual and collective prosperity and harmony. This is why the global rise of capitalism, which relies on consent and individual choice, unleashed unprecedented human prosperity in the 19th century that continues to this day.

But choice also matters a great deal from a moral perspective, and this idea tends to receive much less attention.

The economist Ludwig von Mises once observed that “exhortations and admonishments of morality” are useless unless people are freely allowed to choose.

“It is useless to tell a bondsman what is morally good and what is morally bad. He is not free to determine his comportment; he is forced to obey the orders of his master,” Mises wrote. “This is why freedom is not only a political postulate, but no less a postulate of every religious or secular morality.”

The economist Murray Rothbard was even more concise.

“To be moral, an act must be free,” Rothbard said.

Rothbard drew inspiration from philosopher Frank Meyer, who noted that the ability to choose—whether the choice be good or ill—is what distinguishes man from beast.

“[Man] must be free to choose his worst as well as his best end,” Meyer wrote in Defense of Freedom. “Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose his best.”

When Andrew Wiggins says, “I didn’t like that it wasn’t my choice,” I suspect this is what he was referring to. As Meyer says, having a choice is what separates humans from beasts, which is why it chafes when we’re deprived of it.

Some may quibble and say that Wiggins did have a choice: Get vaccinated or don’t play basketball. They’d be right, but that is a choice he never should have had to make.

The great American thinker Henry David Thoreau, who once went to jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, likely would have sympathized with Wiggins’s dismay at being coerced to get vaccinated, whether the pressure came from a government body or an employer.

“I was not born to be forced,” the Civil Disobedience author noted. “I will breathe after my own fashion.”

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.