First Goldman Sachs, now General Electric.

At GE’s annual meeting on April 26, two rightwing activists named Steve Milloy and Tom Borelli plan to question GE Chairman Jeff Immelt about the profitability of his company’s green initiative. The same gents tried a similar stunt last week in New York at Goldman’s annual meeting, when they lit into Chairman Hank Paulson. They asked whether the chief executive officer’s public program to make Goldman a big contributor to environmental causes – and his position as chairman of the Nature Conservancy – conflicted with his duty toward shareholders.

Milloy and Borelli aren’t merely acting as individual shareholders. They have also institutionalized their dissatisfaction, opening a new mutual fund, the Free Enterprise Action Fund, in March 2005. The fund owns shares in some 390 of the Standard & Poor 500 Index stocks, and pledges to deliver a competitive return.

The fund has a second goal: “We want to counter-pressure CEOs who are doing the wrong thing,” Milloy says. “Being green is not a business strategy and it does not help GE sell better products. So it won’t show up in the bottom line.”

The fund’s Web site couldn’t be blunter, featuring a blast from Milton Friedman. “The social responsibility of a business is to increase its profits,” says the Nobel economics laureate and champion of free enterprise.

With less than $6 million under management, the fund is more mite than gadfly for now. It’s nothing next to Domini Social Equity Fund, whose net assets exceed $1 billion. Still, a right-wing fund is an idea with potential. Just by existing, the fund provides something new, a meter against which to measure the cost companies may incur when they include political aims among their goals.

Since its inception, the value of the Free Enterprise Action Fund is up 4.8 percent, about half the gain of the S&P 500, in part because of start-up expenses. But the fund is doing better than GE, down about 1 percent since March 2005, when Immelt was preparing to launch GE’s Ecomagination program.

More importantly, the fund might change the dynamic on the stage of institutional investing, now dominated by two groups. The first are the classic leftie activist funds, such as Domini Social Investments or the Calvert Social Index Fund. Started in the 1970s and ’80s, these funds have grown while trafficking in sanctimony. Domini’s Web site, for example, assures us that, “The Way You Invest Matters; Be part of the solution.”

The second group is made up of the neutral companies, the ones whom the colorful social gadflies are driving gradually leftward. These companies feel beleaguered, not to mention inappropriately marginalized. A right-wing activist fund might rectify this asymmetry. What’s more, the fund’s founders have recognized that there is one way in which the right-wing brain is identical to the left-wing one: It likes to make money while advancing a cause.

“Ordinarily someone like Steve Milloy would call me up and say how about contributing X dollars so I can make the case for free enterprise before corporate boards,” says Bob Levy, an individual investor in the fund. “I would evaluate that against the other charitable contributions I would make to the same end. This is a cost-free way of advancing my agenda.”

The Free Enterprise Action Fund already seems to be providing that dual effect. At Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s annual meeting last week, Borelli announced that the fund wouldn’t support the candidacy of Lord John Browne, BP Plc’s group chief executive officer, as a Goldman director. He said that Brown needs to spend more time on facility safety than on green dreams. Milloy accused Paulson of promoting his hobby as a conservationist by using Goldman’s assets.

General Electric Co.’s proxy statement for 2006 shows that at the annual meeting in Philadelphia, shareholders will vote on a shareholder proposal by Milloy and Borelli that GE disclose “estimates of costs and benefits to GE of its climate change policy.” GE spokesman Gary Sheffer says that Ecomagination was never expected to prove itself in a year. “The goals we set were long term,” he says.

For a firm in the money management business, the Free Enterprise Action Fund is embarrassingly dominated by policy people. Milloy has been a staff attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, but is best known for creatingjunkscience.com, a Web site devoted to assailing the concept that carbon emissions cause global warming. Worse, at least to the traditional investor mindset, is that think-tank types are disconcertingly over-represented in its roster of investors: Tom Phillips of Eagle Publishing, Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Levy, a scholar of constitutional law at the libertarian Cato Institute.

A final problem is that investor Levy’s argument about cost-free is not quite right. Because the fund is so small, the various management fees are higher than those at a larger fund. Levy says that if the fund grows, its pricing will become more competitive and the difference between its returns and those of other funds will narrow. Still, my bet is that the policy people make fine investors, and that the fund will grow. If mighty Fox News can rise where before there was only CNN, a right-wing fund can challenge a Domini or a Calvert.

Miss Shlaes is a columnist for Bloomberg News.