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It was a meeting of financial advisers, held in the basement of the United Nations headquarters in New York, and it was about, of all things, sustainable development goals. But as someone who was there, I can tell you that passions soared in that forum earlier this month — perhaps because many member countries hope to benefit from a massive wealth transfer from developed economies.
The UN sustainable development goals target urgent problems impacting humanity. There are 169 proposed targets grouped into 17 goals that aim to eliminate global poverty and hunger, ensure healthy lives and quality education for everyone, and take immediate action to combat climate change, among other things. They are aspirational and require buy-in from governments, at a prohibitive price of US$5 to US$7 trillion annually, from now until 2030. They will also require the private sector to pay a cost that is incalculable.
In spite of the inspirational rhetoric, the goals have been criticized as overly ambitious, too numerous, contradictory and ultimately unachievable. Moreover, like other lofty visions, they have the capacity to cause significant harm by weakening the foundation of the free enterprise system. The mechanism to achieve that dystopian objective, so cherished by socialists and crypto-communists, is the subversive but these days all-too-fashionable concept of “sustainable finance.”
Advocates for sustainable development goals advance an interventionist agenda to correct the perceived and alleged failures of free markets, including corporate monopoly power, ineffective financial regulation, income inequality, globalization, job-killing automation and, prominently, climate change. The prevailing, frequently emotional, sentiment at that UN meeting was that these failures justified marshalling the immense resources of the private sector to repair the world.
Historically, the private sector has contributed to the greater good indirectly, but significantly, by creating jobs and wealth, paying taxes, innovating, philanthropy and, above all, making life better by providing people with the products and services they want made continuously better and sold increasingly cheaper. Now, corporations are called upon to assume direct responsibility for addressing societal ills and environmental risks that have traditionally been the purview of governments, charities, NGOs and individual volunteers.
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