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Patrick Deneen and Andy Puzder debate the obligations of business.

How should businesses balance shareholder interests with obligations to their workers, communities, and nation?

The Wall Street Journal’s defense of private equity (“Populists Don’t Know Much About Private Equity”) is an impressionist masterpiece of market fundamentalism, relying on the unexamined assumption that fees paid to private-equity partners represent “social value.” One can simply step back and gawk in amazement, but true appreciation requires poring over each brushstroke.

Grant Kettering’s critique of Coin-Flip Capitalism defends private finance as “a major competitive advantage and source of comprehensive national power.”

Imagine a schoolteacher in a mid-sized American city. She earns approximately $60,000 per year and each month contributes somewhere between 6 and 12 percent of her wages to the state’s public employee pension plan. Given her salary and associated living expenses, a robust personal savings plan seems out of the question. For the teacher – and the firefighter, the police officer, and many other public employees – pension benefits are the only hope for financial security in retirement.

The basic motivation behind American Compass’s Coin-Flip Capitalism project seems to be scrutinizing the private fund industry—an industry that is indeed poorly understood by most—under the suspicion that, amidst its mysteries and its trillions, it may be detracting from our national welfare. Fair enough.

We used to joke on Wall Street that you should marry a trader at another firm, trade with only each other, and by end of the year one would have Read more…

Archive of Returns Counter data as of Q2 2020