Your must-read of the day comes from the Examiner’s Tim Carney, who takes up a pet issue of mine, the critical difference between being pro-market and being pro-business, and the problem Mitt Romney creates for himself when he conflates the two. Here’s a sample:
Romney on Tuesday said “regulators have to see their job” as “promoting enterprise and fostering job creation. Washington has to become an ally of business, not the opposition of business.” He’s half-right, but why should regulators be “an ally of business”? Why not just leave business alone as much as possible? And is “fostering job creation” really Washington’s job, as opposed to simply “allowing job creation”?
This talk of business-government cooperation is standard Romney fare, but it will hurt him this election. Defining himself as pro-business and Obama as anti-business sets Romney up for easy refutation. Obama can point to plenty of subsidies that have “fostered job creation” in his favored industries, and Obama can point to plenty of successful businesses he’s helped with protective regulation and handouts.
But this pro-business frame also misses out on an opportunity to tap into the broad perception in this country, from Left to Right, that the game is rigged in favor of the well-connected and the too-big-to-fail. Romney, instead of merely attacking Obama for redistributing wealth, could point out that Obama often redistributes it upward, to the drug companies with their double-digit profit margins and to the likes of Boeing and General Electric.
That same upward redistribution of wealth is not the sole province of Mr. Obama. For longer than I care to remember, I’ve railed against the same behavior in state and local governments. Virginia’s political class — both sides — has played the game as well as anyone. It’s all done under the cover of creating jobs. Or it’s excused as the cost of living in the real world, where other governments hand out subsidies and tax breaks like candy.
At best this is a transparent dodge. At worst, it is the willing sacrifice of principle for a press release headline.
I’ve almost completely given up that our locally grown pols will change their ways. Until the reservoir of other people’s money dries up, they will continue to hand it out to the well-heeled because their peers elsewhere do it, too.
But here’s hoping that at some point soon, at least one of them will rear up and say “no more” to corporate welfare — and become a true, pro-market, advocate.
