The SEC’s Climate-Disclosure Proposal Politicizes Corporate Oversight

In his latest column for Real Clear Markets, Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Director Scott Shepard discusses proposed environmental regulation being considered by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). 

“The deepest danger that arises from this proposed rule,” Scott writes, “is that it will permanently politicize corporate oversight in the United States, and so finally, fully wreck American productivity advantages.” 

This week, SEC Chair Gary Gensler proposed a rule that would force corporations to report about their emissions according to hard-left, climate-catastrophist assumptions.

Scott explains why this rule would stifle American production, and delves deeper into the dangers of socialism and how such regulation could lead us further down the road to serfdom.

“One of the central geniuses of free-market capitalism is its power as an engine of innovation,” Scott continues, noting that such bureaucratic politicization of American companies moves us further away from the founding ideals that have allowed our nation to prosper. “The further any system gets from this free-market ideal, the less well the innovation engine ticks over and so the less everyone prospers.”

“If the regulation of American business – the rules that apply to every public company’s conduct of its day-to-day affairs – shifts fundamentally every time control of the White House switches parties, American business will be crippled,” Scott writes.

To read the full piece and learn more about the dangers of the SEC’s proposed regulation, click here.

Ethan Peck is an associate for the National Center’s Free Enterprise Project, the conservative movement’s only full-service shareholder activism and education program.