You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life - Albert Camus

Monday, June 01, 2009

Tom Borelli makes a good point:

President Obama and Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) have found big business to be a crucial ally in their quest for a national cap-and-trade law to limit carbon emissions.

Corporate backing greatly enhances the global warming bill’s prospects of passing, but it also reveals a key feature of Obama’s political strategy: a new era of special interest politics in which major corporations work in concert with liberal politicians and advocacy groups to advance the left-wing agenda.

We’ve seen lots of this under the Bush people.  Big Business loved the small-business crushing CPSIA, for example.  Why would they embrace cap and trade?  For the same reason—they can use government to destroy the competition.

In this deal, CEOs obtain special legislative carve outs that give their company a competitive advantage over competition. In addition, needy CEOs also get accolades from the liberal elite in the form of ego-boosting media stories and, for a select few, photo opportunities with the president.

In exchange, the Left acquires the almost unlimited resources of a corporation – lobbying, public relations and advertising – to promote its political agenda. With GE, the liberal movement also acquires the company’s media units (NBC, MSNBC and CNBC), which aggressively push the green agenda in news coverage and network programming.

Perhaps the greatest danger comes from health care.  Business loved it when Bush massively expanded Medicaid; it allowed him to throw low-paid employees into the federal Healthcare gulag.  And indeed, as Stephen Bainbridge points out, that my be the ultimate path for socialized medicine:

Public choice theory teaches us that legislation is a commodity sold by politicians to well-organized interest groups (to grossly oversimplify things). In 1994, Hillarycare died because powerful interest groups were lined up on both sides of the issue, with the main business lobbies lined up against it. So there was no sale.

I predict that the next time a universal single payer plan gets to the policy table, however, that business will be first in line to back it. When you read interviews like the one Rick Wagoner gave the Journal, one can but conclude that business is itching to shift health care costs off their books and onto the American taxpayer.

It is perhaps the ultimate irony that the fusing of business and government would happen under a Democrat.  But the signs are undeniable.  The core of the GM/Chrysler bailout is an effort to relieve the auto-makers of the absurdly generous retirement and healthcare plans they created when they had a virtual monopoly on the car market.  A massive part of the justification for healthcare nationalization is that it will supposedly make American businesses more competitive abroad—allowing us to finally match France as a titan of industry.  The nationalization of industry is something that broken and failing industries desperately want.  And what big-government liberals and big-government industries want, they generally get.