SB 112-20: Bullmoose Act (Passed)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I will speak on this when I get home.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The primary purpose of this bill is to refocus the responsibilities of corporate officers towards their fiduciary duty towards shareholders.

I do very much understand the argument that shareholders must and should be the first consideration, however, at the same time I have been the first to recognize the importance of balancing a number of competing concerns as well, and that is why I fought for the inclusion of a number of exceptions in this bill.

The last thing I intend to do is advance the interests of the PRC and its state firms, or that of any international trading cartel because of blind adherence to profit uber alles or shareholder capitalism.

I have been at the forefront in pushing back against the flawed idealistic utopianism of economic liberalism especially as it relates to inflation and to monopolies. Trade liberalization only reduces the former by cashing in on temporary states of global tranquility and once such fleeting instances are gone, the only cost of those "Reduced prices" is literally the cost of forcing the world to bend to your will and we know how costly that is. Furthermore, when it comes to monopolies, if the international scene is itself dominated by monopolies, then trade liberalization does not produce competition, it stifles it out of existence.

Trade liberalism possesses in equal measure the same flaws that afflict liberalism more generally. An idealistic and utopian vision of the world, backed up by naïve presumptions about human nature. While the theoretical benefits of such are in fact numerous, beyond our borders and thus beyond our direct ability to maintain a level playing field for such, we are merely engaging in unilateral disarmament, in what promises to become an economic cold war.

In this new environment, a number of assumptions carried over from the previous Cold War will need to be re-evaluated and understand from the basis of the realistic perspective in terms of relative advantages and disadvantages it derives towards one bloc or the other in this new contest.

Certainly, I am all for business, private property and capitalism, but at the same time I am realist and a conservative and therefore it becomes necessary to make decisions that place Atlasia's concerns first. Therefore, if a corporate board decides to sacrifice some amount of profit in the quest to locate a factory in Tennessee or North Carolina, we would be foolish beyond all measure to chain their hands to complete maximization of profit, which in this new, modern age, is tantamount to being chained to the whims of Beijing.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Aye