Is There a Market for “Conscious Capitalists”?

Conscious businesses are for-profit businesses that act consciously rather than unconsciously or mechanically. They are committed to:

1. Acting out of a deeper purpose than mere profit maximization.

2. A stakeholder approach to value creation, in which the interests of customers, employees, suppliers, investors, the community, and the environment are harmonized and aligned to the greatest extent possible.

3. A sense of servant leadership, through which the management plays a role of steward to the company’s deeper purpose and stakeholder harmonization rather than personal self-aggrandizement.

when we sign a free-trade agreement with a Latin American nation, we are only signing that free trade agreement with 8 percent of the population, because only 8 percent have access to the legal system due to regulatory obstacles.

By contrast, it is free to create a legal business in Denmark. WhileScandinavian nations are often described as “socialist,” they are more accurately described as “free-market welfare states.” Socialism means government control of the economy; but Scandinavian nations, although they have enormous safety nets, in other respects are among the most free-market nations on earth.

Just as a painter needs paints, paintbrushes, and a canvas, an entrepreneur needs key institutions, including property rights, rule of law, and the freedom to create. In order to plan a venture, in order to create new value through a new vision, one must be able to determine what resources one will be allowed to use (well-defined property rights), what the rules will be for using those resources (rule of law), and significant freedom with respect to how to organize and manage those resources (economic freedom). Nineteenth-century classical liberals were clear that these tools were the foundations of the entrepreneurial wealth-creation machine that had made the U.S. and Britain the first societies in the world in which the masses experienced a steadily improving standard of living.

Education, exhortation, and other forms of creating pro-environment value systems help by means of creating a green consumer base（真的吗？有谁买东西会关注是否环保，即使关注，消费者如何获得这个产品是否环保的信息，这种信息谁来提供？政府提供，这是大家都想得到的，让政府去认证这个企业这个产品是否绿色环保；还有其他获取信息的渠道吗？我想有的，比如说企业自己说，产品自己说，企业旁边的人说，需要的是一个独立的信息平台，这个平台只有中央才能建立，也就是消费者评价系统。） that, through purchasing green, drives more green innovations for the future than would otherwise be the case. That said, in order to solve more substantial environmental problems, we need to change the legal environment within which entrepreneurs start and grow companies so that they can solve more problems.

The three most important legal changes are:

1. Eliminate environmentally harmful subsidies and regulations. Worldwatchestimates that every American family could get a $2,000 tax cut by means of eliminating environmentally harmful subsidies.

2. A green tax shift, shifting taxes away from work, savings, and investment, and toward taxing environmental harms. This will allow more green entrepreneurs to become more profitable more quickly, while also penalizing environmentally harmful industry. Al Gore’s proposal to eliminate all payroll taxes in exchange for revenue-neutral carbon taxes is the most famous example of such a green tax shift. (Strategically, it would be better to emphasize the benefits for business and employment growth through eliminating payroll taxes rather than to harp on climate).

3. Environmental trusts, in which key ecosystems are taken from government control and put in the hands of trusts with a legal responsibility to protect the environment (see Peter Barnes’s Capitalism 3.0).

While these approaches may not have the visceral appeal of moralizing, they are likely to have a more substantial long-term impact because they release entrepreneurial creativity on behalf of the environment.