Opinion | Vivek Ramaswamy Is Confused

Ramaswamy proposes mandatory national service for American high schoolers — he cites Pete Buttigieg’s similar call during his 2020 presidential campaign — and calls for “a hefty inheritance tax with no gaping loopholes” to prevent America’s meritocratic winners from morphing into aristocratic ones. He emphasizes the need for stronger job retraining programs for displaced blue-collar workers, the deregulation of housing markets and the easing of professional licensing requirements. He urges companies to prioritize “diversity of thought” among their employees rather than a diversity “crudely measured by appearance or accent.” And he longs for a “Manhattan Project” (an obligatory reference for policy mavens) for the national semiconductor industry to raise America’s economic and military competitiveness.

Particularly striking are Ramaswamy’s thoughts on how to move the country beyond the identity conflicts that, in his view, erode our sense of nationhood. “The only way to break free of this vicious cycle is to find a way to forgive each other instead of trying to win at the game of playing the victim,” he writes. Our true selves do not equal our superficial identities, Ramaswamy insists, and we become better people when we see ourselves and others as individuals with the power to direct their own lives. “When you free yourself from the illusion that you’re a mere victim, you simultaneously free yourself from seeing others as mere oppressors,” he writes. This plea for collective forgiveness is a welcome break from the hyper-pugilism of Ramaswamy’s campaign appearances, even if his harsh exchanges on the Republican debate stage suggest that his conciliatory side has not yet taken hold.

“Capitalist Punishment,” the latest and slimmest of his books, is something of an outlier in the Ramaswamy canon. It is narrowly cast, focusing on his criticism of investment funds that adopt E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance) principles to guide their strategies. Here, Ramaswamy’s transgressors are the investment firms BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. “The Big Three are becoming a threat to democracy,” he contends, because they impose social-activist values onto the industries in which they hold significant positions, including the oil and banking sectors, and because pension fund managers adopt E.S.G. investing even if individual pensioners may be ignorant of (or hostile to) such principles. “When elites force their values onto everyone else,” he writes, ordinary people lose trust in important institutions. “And that, in turn, makes society fall apart.”

As in his other works, some tensions emerge in “Capitalist Punishment.” When Ramaswamy complains that E.S.G. investing is radically transforming corporate America but also revels in the fact that E.S.G. funds are “underperforming” and “dropping like flies,” it’s hard to tell if E.S.G. investing is pervasive or in decline. Yet, near the end of the book, readers gain some clarity on Ramaswamy’s own interests and motives.

He calls for antitrust lawsuits against the big three and suggests that Black Rock break itself into two smaller firms. Ever helpful, he also offers an alternative for investors — an investment firm called Strive, co-founded in 2022 by Ramaswamy himself. And here the book reads almost like a fund prospectus:

Strive’s mandate to underlying companies is simple: focus on excellence over politics; provide excellent products and services to your customers; and maximize value for your shareholders by doing that rather than advancing any particular social or political agenda.

Though he retains a multimillion-dollar stake in the company, Ramaswamy resigned from the board and relinquished his day-to-day responsibilities at Strive earlier this year because he was running for president. Even so, depending on the standards to which one holds politicians, Ramaswamy’s self-serving approach in “Capitalist Punishment” may be disheartening or pedestrian. At the very least, encountering it does persuade me, as Ramaswamy argues in these books, that there are plenty of business people out there “pretending to care about justice in order to make money.”