The funny thing is they have no voting power as there are so few of them.

“Business people struggle to understand fanaticism. In commercial life, all actors are negotiable, even if their price is high. You might pass decades in the private sector without encountering someone who has total commitment to an abstract doctrine (socialism), to an individual (Trump) or to a cause (Russian amour propre). This blind spot for zeal is why corporations were such sitting ducks for ‘woke’. And why oligarchs a generation ago thought Vladimir Putin was their pliable instrument.

…

Dissent is core to financial success. Why buy an asset unless you think the market has underpriced it? Why set up a business unless you think the world is wrong not to have offered that product or service already? Opening the humblest corner bistro is, in essence, a statement that everyone who hasn’t opened one there has missed a trick. Imagine how much stronger that contrarian impulse must be in a hedge fund seeking above-market returns.

All power to this attitude. The world would be less prosperous without it. But it doesn’t transfer well to public life. In politics, if you support a radical proposition and turn out to have misjudged it, the consequence might be, oh I don’t know, societal ruin. (Or deaths in the Capitol.) There is no equivalent of limited liability. There is no equivalent of the circuit breakers that the state puts in place to contain bad business bets. The state itself is on the line.”