The "Stakeholder" Conceit

By now, you've probably heard the latest on the Big Government-Big Tech collusion saga. As recently revealed by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH), Facebook received, and complied with, instructions to suppress/remove "Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content," as well as suppress lab-leak origin posts.

As Matt Taibbi shared,

an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg:

We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content.

By now, everyone not wholly in thrall to the Democratic Party and the illiberal Left has realized that this is an egregious a violation of the First Amendment, and exactly why we should be happy the Anti-Federalists prevailed in the debate as to whether a Bill of Rights should be part of the Constitution. In brief, the Federalists, including Madison, Adams, and Hamilton, believed that the Constitution's enumeration of powers was sufficient to preclude government action in other areas, and feared that the listing of some rights might prompt disregard for others (something that the Ninth Amendment protects against).

For we live in an era where people have flipped the nation's founding premise on its head. Rather than "here's a list of what the government is allowed to do, and nothing not on that list is permitted," too many think "if the Constitution doesn't say "no, it can't," then the government can do whatever it wants."

1A's speech protection reads:

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech

Since everything, and I mean everything, the federal government does begins with Congress passing a law, that extends to the bureaucracies, the White House, and every other employee, direct or indirect, of that government.

Pressuring a company to stifle content on its site is as clear a violation of the Constitution as can be.

So, how do supposedly thinking people rationalize the behavior?

For that, I offer you the clue that is the word "stakeholders."

In modern progressive parlance, stakeholders are people who have no personal investment in a company but, because they believe themselves affected by the company's actions, assert a right to a say in those actions, just as shareholders have. With a logic chain that goes something like this:

COVID is a public health matter - government has a duty and obligation to protect public health - lab-leak theories run against the government's asserted position and thus undermine trust - undermined trust fuels vaccine hesitancy, as do unsanctioned contrary opinions - vaccine hesitancy affects public health - therefore the government is a stakeholder in any information dissemination platform - therefore as a stakeholder government has justification in pressuring those platforms to suppress certain content.

Thing is, "stakeholder" is unmitigated bullshit. Unless you own a piece of a company, you cannot assert authority over its actions. Worse, anyone who wants to direct those actions but is at no risk from the consequences of those actions has no incentive to directing wisely or prudently, and instead is simply demanding that OPM be spent as he wishes. All sorts of sophistry has been cobbled together to divert from this plain point, but word salad doesn't make a bad argument any better. Hint: if someone starts pontificating about externalities, watch your wallet.

To take this "stakeholder" concept to its full extent, everyone (directly or via government) should have a say in how every private company runs, because you can assert stakeholder status for everything under the sun (and for the sun itself, since it sustains your life).

In traditional economic parlance, a system where the government exercises tight control over privately owned businesses is called "fascism."

In modern parlance, a system where stakeholders exercise control over privately owned businesses is called "democratic socialism." The DemSocs want to eliminate the concept of corporations entirely, and have employees own the companies they work for. No personal investment required - all working capital would be provided by the government.

Or so they wrote a few years ago when I first visit the website of the Democratic Socialists of America.

They've since toned it down... just a bit. In the DSA's own words:

We fight for the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a democratically run economy that provides for people’s needs. Our demands:

Social ownership and democratic control of utilities and key industries including water, gas, electric, telecommunications, media, and internet service providers and other critical sectors of the economy through direct government support, public banks, and pension funds at every level of government

Nationalize and socialize (through worker and community ownership and control) institutions of monetary policy, insurance, real estate, and finance

Ensure that employees have the right to purchase businesses and are able to secure funding to facilitate their cooperative ownership in the event of a sale or closure.

All this is born of the stakeholder conceit - the belief that you are entitled to control someone else's property. It's the great conceit foisted upon us by that dilettante Karl Marx, and by every lazy envier since him.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the stakeholder argument arose in the revealed Facebook memo, or in the government's free speech infringements, or in the support for those infringements from the illiberal Left and various other fascists.