Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has some visions of how she’d like society to be. It’s fine, of course, for a politician to have thoughts about how to better the world. But plans about what should be should always have to be based upon what is. And that leads me to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers schooling the good senator from Massachusetts in a column last week.

Warren is insistent that American business is just all too short-termist. So much so that she’s drafted the Accountable Capitalism Act (OK, floated the idea as part of the politicking up to the midterm elections) to make things more long-term. This approach has a number of problems. One of which is that if a company does pay out its profits, that doesn’t mean the money’s lost to the economy, just that someone else now assumes the decision about whether to invest or spend it. Conceptually all companies paying all their profits in dividends and buybacks could make no difference whatsoever to the general level of investment in the economy.