Find the article itself over here…
The Central Argument
The piece is essentially a Rothbardian shrug at environmentalist outrage over greenwashing. The author’s thesis: businesses are amoral demand-satisfiers. They didn’t create environmentalist ideology; they’re just monetising it like they monetise every other passing craze — tobacco, communism, tulips, Mussar. Greenwashing isn’t corruption of capitalism; it is capitalism, doing exactly what it does; customers don’t want the truth, or they don’t know what they want yet.
Key moves the author makes:
Against Rand: The opening salvo is a rebuke of Ayn Rand’s romanticisation of businessmen as conscious philosopher-heroes. The author’s view is sharply demystifying — businessmen have an unteachable practical knack, don’t understand economics, and couldn’t care less about “what money represents.” This is very Rothbardian: no heroic capitalist class, just actors responding to price signals.
The demand problem: The author raises the Yetzer Hara / Nisayon framing (the evil inclination / test) for the question of whether businesses worsen culture or merely capitalise on pre-existing demand. His conclusion leans toward the latter — if demand is already there, the supplier is neither helping nor hurting. This is a classically libertarian deflection of moral responsibility away from the producer.
Against regulation: His response to critics demanding tighter enforcement is crisp and characteristically iconoclastic — why not private certification, like hechshers? The analogy to kosher certification is a clever and characteristically Jewish move: the market already invented this, it’s called kashrus, you don’t need the FTC (at some price, anyway!).
The Feiglin quote: “A small-time criminal breaks the law. A medium criminal bypasses the law. A major criminal perpetrates his crime by means of the law.” This is the rhetorical apex of the piece — regulatory capture as the real greenwashing story. The bottled water industry example follows: “pure, untouched water” legally redefined to permit sugar additives. The target isn’t the dishonest marketer; it’s the state that launders corporate fraud through legislation.
On the “Seven Sins”: He subverts the “sins” as consulting advice for business…
The voice and method
The piece is written in the author’s signature style: short punchy paragraphs, rhetorical questions, strategic italics, dry wit. The Wikipedia excerpts serve as a foil — the author uses mainstream framing as a punching bag to demonstrate how statist assumptions are smuggled into seemingly neutral language (“lax enforcement compounds the problem” — he catches the moral hazard implication hiding in the word “compound”). Very sharp reading.
What the author is not saying
He’s not defending greenwashing as admirable. He’s deflating the moral panic around it. The implicit message: if you want honest environmental labelling, build a private certification market. Stop demanding that the state fix problems the state’s own regulatory apparatus helps create.
Claude also found me a parallel to “customers don’t want the truth” I had never heard before:
Akerlof and Shiller’s Phishing for Phools (behavioral economics) explicitly argues that markets efficiently supply manipulation because manipulation is demanded, although they’re alarmed by this and therefore call for State intervention.