Professor Barry Brownstein had a superb article this week about government coercion in political opinion that’s part and parcel of socialism. His timing was fortuitous, because big news items highlighted decision-makers in the business world who desperately need his lesson. His piece serves as a stark warning against the current push to have corporations play politics. Companies can’t use the same brutal tools to starve people into compliance that a totalitarian government can, but their scope for evildoing is still awfully big.

This week’s big news is about the Nike ad featuring unemployed pro football player Colin Kaepernick, whose fame is entirely due to his protests against alleged racist police brutality, which consisted solely of showing public disrespect to the US flag and national anthem at NFL games.

Less splashily but in a similar vein, Levi Strauss & Co. announced a major escalation of their financial support for gun control proponents.

For both moves, there was a huge outpouring of support from those whose own politics match what these companies are pushing. And there was a huge backlash against these actions by those who disagree. From a pure sales standpoint, time will tell what the impact of these actions are on sales for each company.

But sales, while hugely important, are only one of many priorities for corporate executives. From a responsible and ethical leadership point of view, the jury is already in. There are two enormously obvious problems with corporate leaders signing their companies up to play politics like this.

First, Nike is a longstanding public corporation. Its shareholders expect a leadership focus on the business, not on political distractions. Yet CEOs and Boards are now comfortable spending corporate dollars to push their own personal politics. (I defy you to show me a company jumping into politics where the ideological bent doesn’t exactly match the personal politics of the executives making that decision.) Were a lower-tier employee to do such a thing, it would most likely lead to summary termination. And rightly so – in simple terms it’s called theft; in HR-speak it’s “misallocation of company resources.” But as I’ve pointed out many times in other venues, the #MeToo movement highlights the tip of a raging executive malfeasance iceberg: too many business executives believe the rules are for the little people. It’s high time all employees, at all levels, are held to the same standards of behavior and ethics.

Second, whether a company is public or private, its leaders are supposed to be servants of all their employees, all their customers, and all their shareholders. Yet by jumping on political bandwagons, they’re effectively announcing that only those who share their personal politics are welcome. Oh, they won’t go out and fire people willy-nilly for having different opinions. (But let’s not forget last year’s scandalous behavior at Google, where the company not only fired engineer James Damore for his non-politically-correct political opinions; the CEO and VP of “Inclusion” also went public to blatantly misrepresent what he’d written and to shame him. If anyone deserved be fired in that case, it was those two.) But what message does open support for certain politics send to employees? For them, it becomes a chilling effect, sending a clear message that it’s not safe to talk about certain ideas in the workplace – for those on the wrong side of the political aisle, that is. (I wonder how my fellow NRA members working for Levi’s feel right now, for example.) For all the current blather about diversity, this behavior drives anything but. For shareholders and customers of opposing politics, meanwhile, it’s effectively a hostile takeover of a previously trusted company. None of that is right or ethical, and it surely isn’t acceptable leadership.

If you’re an executive and you want to play politics with a company, go found one for yourself on those principles. People do it every day, and the corporate leaders we’re talking about are plenty wealthy enough to do so. But if you lead a public company, or a private one that has a longstanding history of political neutrality, your personal political opinions don’t just magically become that company’s “values” overnight. Get over yourself. And if you can’t exercise restraint and judgment with your politics, get out of the executive role. You don’t deserve it, and your stakeholders deserve a hell of a lot better leadership.

There’s a social aspect here as well, one that is the exact opposite of what these misguided execs believe. They’ve adopted the mantra that our current political disagreements “are too important for us to remain silent.” (By the way, they’re free to speak all they want as private citizens – within the same limitations as those imposed on all their employees, that is.) But as Professor Brownstein points out, “The standard of living we take for granted depends upon minimizing the exercise of coercion.” When fat cats – whether they’re government or corporate types – cow classes of people into silence, our whole society suffers.