How often do you get to read a book that’s impacting society as you’re reading it? Of the hundreds of titles that have changed the world we inhabit, perhaps only a dozen or so have accomplished this feat in real time. They include, probably, To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), certainly The Jungle (1905), and Moneyball (2003) most definitely. As soon as I dove into Andy Puzder’s new book, A Tyranny for the Good of its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism (2025), I was instantly imbued with the realization that the impact of this work is on the present moment.
I cannot summarize the book more succinctly than Art Laffer does in the Foreword: “This book is an effort to make clear the threat that ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and the ESG agenda pose to free-market capitalism and the democratic [process].” You can be forgiven if you aren’t quite sure what those threats are, as the stakeholder capitalism construct does not have a long and storied history. It’s an obscene idea in an obscure setting—thus the need for a book that brings it to light. It’s been trotted out under various names over the past few decades, such as socially-responsible investing, impact investing, sustainable investing, my personal favorite propaganda term, capitalism with a conscience. More recently, the euphemism in vogue is environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing, and this is the focus of Mr. Puzder’s attention.
While each of these carefully-chosen names suggest a minor and benevolent twist on capitalism, it is anything but. Stakeholder capitalism is a clever misdirect, a barely recognizable distant cousin sounding much like ‘shareholder capitalism,’ but flipping the governance agenda so that business owners (shareholders) drop to minor importance in business considerations, compared with any other player in society. This is not a mild perturbation of capitalism—it is an outright rejection of capitalism and the principles of free choice and markets that have given us progress and plenty. Andy notes that “At their core, stakeholder capitalism and the ESG agenda represent a rejection of our nation’s founding principles.” It is a theft, both direct and indirect, of property rights in pursuit of an unclear but fashionable social agenda. While the policies hearken back to Marxist principles, they are driven in our time by progressive elites’ agendas such as the Davos ‘Great Reset’ crowd, and principles stemming from a 2004 UN report, and reinforced by a 2019 Business Roundtable statement.
Ten years ago, no one imagined that our financial markets would become a battlefield in a fight for society’s fortune and future. To the American sensibility, financial markets are the field upon which freedom is exercised in the struggle for prosperity. If we didn’t learn this from Adam Smith, then Milton Friedman reminded us often in clear terms.
Mr. Puzder’s book is a highly-readable, straightforward walk through this underestimated and little-understood threat, the actors, their motivations, and the many-faceted pains it inflicts upon the unsuspecting citizenry. This nonfiction novel is about freedom and prosperity, and power, badly applied, to co-opt and corrupt a major engine of societal progress. The MacGuffin here is climate change, driving the action as much as Darth’s death star plans or Rick’s letters of transit, but otherwise not truly central to the plot. The antagonist is Larry Fink of BlackRock, who represents the broader forces of elitist progressivism, subverting the economic and financial processes ‘by proxy’ in pursuit of collectivist goals. The protagonist is you—your freedom, your goals, your prosperity, under attack at every turn from a lair so well-hidden, that we must thank Mr. Puzder for shining the light on it.
Here’s a simplified version of the plot. Index investing, driven by modern finance theory, becomes a popular low-cost option. Passive investing recently overshadows active, company-focused investing. The bulk of passively-invested funds are managed by the “Big Three” index providers, including Larry Fink’s BlackRock. With their power increased past the tipping point, they begin to exert their power, to vote ‘their’ shares (that they control, but you own) in support of progressive activist ESG resolutions, without regard to how those changes align with shareholder interests. They soon learn that while voting is powerful, ‘jawboning’ is even more powerful, and jawboning combined with voting is near omnipotent when they control the most shares in nearly every public company. Soon they find strident goading from the sideline is enough to browbeat companies’ managements into submitting to whatever fashionable policies and actions the Big Three favor, however negative for the companies’ future, financials, or shareholders. Fear replaces profits as the prime motivator for management. The accountability and fiduciary link back to the owners’ interests is broken. An entire ecosystem is created around this to embolden stakeholder capitalism, all using other peoples’ money, to tear down shareholder capitalism’s engine of progress, and divert the owner’s resources to others. (I’d love to have seen a chapter on the excessive impact of the two foreign companies that control nearly all the U.S. proxy advisory business—although the author does weave the activities of these henchmen into the machinery of the overall scheme in the final chapter.) I feel guilty that I did not provide a spoiler alert—but watching as Andy skillfully develops the plot is stimulating nonetheless.
Was Mr. Fink’s turn to the dark side real? Just to check, I ran a word analysis on his Annual Letter to CEO’s for both 2016 (1,400+ words) and 2021 (2,800+ words). In these letters, he defines how the CEOs of “his” companies (essentially all public companies) should think about business, and behave. In 2016, his primer on applied capitalism used the words growth, value creation, and plans 25 times; five years later, a scant 5 mentions. But plans only occurs as: “…we ask that your disclosures on talent strategy fully reflect your long-term plans to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion…” Can you imagine ignoring that subtle hint from your biggest shareholder, if you were CEO? On the flip side, while shareholder nearly drops from the missive, stakeholder rises from a single mention in 2016 to a whopping 13 instances in 2021; while global, inclusive, world, climate, and sustainable shot up from 8 uses in 2016 to 72 hits in his not-quite-understated 2021 missive. Most telling to me, earnings, strategy, cash, results, or dividends, all meaty business focuses of his 2016 business guide, disappear entirely from his vocabulary by 2021. Who needs all that? Maybe he’s just not that into capitalism.
Mr. Puzder does lead you through extensive discussions and examples of exactly what the antagonists and their brethren progressive elites here are into, which are various forms of undemocratic collectivist principles and solutions, control of the masses (especially by using their victims’ money), and a variety of end-states we generally associate with socialism. Property rights are viewed as “so last decade.” He analyzes how this is both a theft, and a breaking of trust, not to mention an unwinding of centuries of growth and poverty-reducing progress and prosperity. Andy reminds us of essential aspects of functioning financial systems—that they are based on both trust and fiduciary responsibility. Once those are subjugated or lost, the game is up.
Ironically, the ESG proponents, ostensibly desiring better governance, go in the other direction by redefining (stakeholders) and co-opting (voting shares they don’t really own) the entire financial governance process. Andy warns that “The [rich, elitist] purveyors of ESG…are using your money go advance their goals, which they know you do not support, in the smug confidence that you would support their agenda if only you were smart enough to make decisions for yourselves…as they deem us incapable of governing ourselves.”
These elites have such confidence in their omniscience and lofty goals, Mr. Puzder points out, that they see their aims as superior to anything resulting from markets, the plebian masses, or their elected governments. Mr. Puzder writes this book so that we can “…look at what empowered these financial elites to impose their social and political agenda on American businesses and, by proxy, on all of us; at the resulting assault on free-market capitalism, and how America has resisted this latest collectivist assault.”
While Andy’s work here is not a screed against passive investing, he does make clear how one of the most beneficial investment developments of the past 60 years can be conveniently circumvented and co-opted for evil. His conversational style makes for an easy read, making accessible what to most will be an esoteric topic. This book is meticulously well-researched and documented, with 68 pages of endnotes.
His book’s title is a play on a famous C.S. Lewis essay on ethics, which the author references here in Chapter 8:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
The plot builds logically and inexorably to its potentially gruesome and ghastly end. But then the surprise twist at the end, supported by real-time developments, is that the worm is turning, with successful push-back on a variety of fronts. Rumors of the death of shareholder capitalism may be greatly exaggerated—but he points out the same could be said for ESG and stakeholder capitalism, as in the political economy game of whack-a-mole, socialist schemes and ideas will pop up again and again, so we must be ever vigilant. Andy quotes a recent president on the importance of not giving up in this fight for prosperity:
“We don’t dispute that the free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history – it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.”
President Barrack Obama, 2015
If you always prefer collectivist solutions; if you have great disdain for consumers, voters, and progress; if you think yourself so smart that you should control all those around you; then, you likely won’t appreciate this book. To others, concerned with well-functioning financial and economic systems, a fuller retirement fund, and a freer future, I can strongly recommend Mr. Puzder’s fine work.
