Penelope Schrywer’s response to my recent article, “The delusion of the triple bottom line”, was thoughtful, courteous and considerably more sophisticated than many contemporary defences of environmental, social and governance (ESG) orthodoxy.She correctly identifies the serious conceptual weaknesses in the ESG “project” and acknowledges many of its metrics are inconsistent, opaque and methodologically unreliable. However, despite these concessions her central argument ultimately rests on precisely the same intellectual error that has animated ESG from the beginning: the belief that company managers and capital allocators should somehow be transformed into quasi-political actors tasked with adjudicating social and environmental priorities. That proposition remains deeply flawed. Schrywer argues ESG merely extends “the Hayekian logic of price discovery” to externalities “not yet” captured by markets. This formulation is elegant, but profoundly misleading. Hayek’s insight rested on decentralised price formation emerging voluntarily through millions of independent exchanges within a competitive market order. ESG does the opposite — it superimposes politically and ideologically selected criteria onto capital allocation through institutional coercion, bureaucratic pressure and reputational intimidation. There is nothing authentically Hayekian about a small group of ratings agencies, multilateral institutions, activist investors and state bureaucrats determining what constitutes acceptable corporate virtue. The problem is ESG metrics are fundamentally flawed and inherently incapable of neutrality. ESG priorities inevitably involve contested moral, political and economic trade-offs. One investor may prioritise decarbonisation above all else. Another may regard employment creation as the overriding social imperative. ESG frameworks cannot be reduced to technocratic scoring systems. Once investment decisions become contingent on politically fashionable preferences, capital allocation ceases to operate as an economic mechanism and becomes an instrument of social engineering. Schrywer cites studies suggesting firms with higher ESG scores enjoy lower costs of capital. Even if accepted at face value, this proves very little. Large, mature, successful firms with abundant resources are naturally better positioned to comply with complex ESG reporting requirements, simply passing their costs on to customers. This does not establish that ESG creates economic value. It merely demonstrates wealthy firms are better able to satisfy fashionably conceited compliance regimes. More importantly, the existence of preferential capital flows toward ESG-compliant firms is not evidence of market efficiency. It reflects instead the immense political and institutional pressures bearing on pension funds, banks, asset managers and the like. If regulators signal climate exposure will attract punitive scrutiny, if activist campaigns threaten reputational damage, if disclosure obligations steadily escalate, then naturally capital will migrate toward firms most capable of navigating this regulatory perplexity. That is not spontaneous market discovery — it is perverse regulatory distortion. Schrywer further argues South Africa must embrace ESG realities because international carbon border adjustment regimes are emerging regardless of our preferences. This argument deserves careful attention because it is probably the strongest practical case advanced by ESG proponents. Yet even here, the conclusion does not follow. The fact that large jurisdictions such as the EU choose to impose carbon border taxes does not validate the intellectual foundations of ESG. It merely demonstrates the geopolitical capacity of wealthy economies to export their policy preferences into global trade. South Africa should recognise this reality clearly for what it is. Over two centuries Europe industrialised through extraordinarily carbon-intensive development, often accompanied by severe environmental degradation and exploitative labour conditions. Having achieved prosperity and capital accumulation under those conditions, it now seeks to hobble and hold back others by imposing restrictive decarbonisation disciplines on countries still struggling to industrialise. That is not moral leadership — it is the internationalisation of developmental asymmetry. South Africa’s economic reality cannot be wished away through “sustainability” rhetoric. Ours remains a coal-dependent developing economy with catastrophic unemployment, severe energy insecurity and chronically weak growth. Under such conditions, affordable and reliable energy is not merely an economic variable. It is an outright humanitarian necessity. The fashionable tendency among ESG advocates to treat hydrocarbons as moral liabilities rather than developmental assets reflects a perspective overwhelmingly shaped by affluent post-industrial societies. Schrywer criticises the Free Market Foundation for opposing South Africa’s carbon tax while simultaneously arguing pollution should, if necessary, be addressed through law. This confuses principle with policy. To acknowledge environmental harms may legitimately be addressed through narrowly tailored legislation does not imply support of every intervention advanced in the name of climate policy. A carbon tax imposed on an economy already crippled by electricity shortages, regulatory overreach, excessive taxation, an extractive state, industrial decline and mass unemployment carries enormous economic and political risks. The question is whether the proposed policy response produces greater social and economic harm than the problem it seeks to address. It is, moreover, not inconsistent to argue that if governments wish to regulate emissions, they should do so transparently through democratic legislation rather than through politicised capital allocation mechanisms. This distinction is crucial. When governments legislate, voters retain at least some capacity for democratic accountability. ESG systems, by contrast, frequently transfer immense practical authority over economic outcomes to unelected actors largely insulated from public scrutiny and accountability. This is precisely why ESG increasingly appears less like responsible investing and much more like privatised technocracy. Schrywer contends too that climate-related risks are directly affecting balance sheets through insurance costs, supply-chain disruptions and infrastructure pressures. But corporations have always managed material risks. Commodity volatility, geopolitical instability, labour unrest, litigation exposure and technological disruption all affect long-term profitability. Markets everywhere already possess mechanisms for pricing such risks where they are genuinely material. The danger arises when the definition of “materiality” expands so broadly that virtually every political or social issue becomes grounds for investor intervention. At that point, corporate governance loses its focus. Managers become accountable not merely for producing goods and services profitably within the law, but for satisfying an ever-expanding universe of activist expectations concerning climate, inequality, diversity, transgenderism, geopolitics and social justice. The result is managerial diffusion, reduced accountability and declining economic clarity. Milton Friedman’s central insight remains correct: the social responsibility of business is to conduct business successfully within the framework of law and ethical conduct. Democratic societies possess governments precisely because political trade-offs should be resolved politically, not delegated to corporate boards, company managers, ratings agencies and asset managers. None of this implies hostility toward responsible governance or voluntary philanthropy. Companies are entirely free to pursue sustainability initiatives, improve labour practices or reduce environmental impacts wherever shareholders and consumers support such measures. What is objectionable is the transformation of these discretionary preferences into quasi-compulsory ideological imperatives. The triple bottom line fails because there is no coherent mechanism for balancing three allegedly equal bottom lines. When trade-offs become unavoidable, as they invariably do, economic sustainability must remain primary. Without profitability and growth there are neither jobs, nor investment, nor tax revenues, nor the surplus resources necessary to fund environmental improvement itself. Prosperous societies become environmentally cleaner largely because they first become prosperous. History repeatedly demonstrates this sequence. The danger for South Africa is that in embracing ESG orthodoxy, we risk importing the luxury beliefs of wealthy economies into a society that has not yet achieved even the elementary foundations those societies long possess. That does not represent enlightened progress; that represents a profoundly expensive delusion. • Dr Benfield, a retired Wits University professor of economics, is a senior associate and board member of the Free Market Foundation.