Unethical Investing

It’s rare to find commentary on ethical investing embedded in TV reviewing, so I was happy to find it in Sarah Miller’s She’d Like To Make An Unethical Investment - In Another Man’s Penis:

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that this show is some kind of secret project to advertise ethical investing while distracting you with poolside orgasms. Let’s just stick to the surface: this is a show about a woman ostensibly choosing between something risky and exciting and something safe and a little dull. The safe, dull thing, as represented by Cooper, is ethical investing. But ethical investing is not any different from any other investing. I don’t want to write a whole treatise laying this out, it’s just true that the only way to accumulate profit is to get people to create more value with their work than you actually pay them. This is not a political philosophy. This is a fact.

This fact has been the backbone of every single conversation I’ve had with investment advisors: I tell them I’m an anti-capitalist, they tell me about ethical investing, I tell them that the Rubicon for me is about investing at all, and that if I’m going to cross over I might as well invest in nuclear arms dealers and cigarette vending machines for children. And then we get stuck.

Which is why my modest portfolio remains 100% investing in credit union GICs (which, I imagine, are, alas, being invested on my behalf).