Are Business Elites Capitalists?
Your Business Blogger once partnered with a former McKinsey Consultant, a brilliant mind with a Ph.D. in Math from Columbia. I once wondered aloud why McKinsey, indeed all big business seemed to be confused conservatives.
If you are in business, doing business, creating wealth — you must be a Calvin Coolidge conservative GOP’er. Right?
“Silly knave,” says my elder, better business partner. “Businesses always start out conservative — but turn liberal as they get bigger.” Then he launches into correlations and matrixes and standard deviations, proof theorems for the evolution from small government business conservative to big government business liberal elite.
Someone should write a book, I thought. And warn us.
Someone has.
Tim Carey has written the Big Ripoff.
Tim Carney
Tim’s thesis is that Big Business actually embraces and welcomes Big Government regulation to install barriers to entry to hinder smaller competitors.
Big Government has become the enabler of, and provided of a competitive advantage for Big Business.
Liberal elites in business are more interested in protecting a current position than in encouraging innovation, especially if the new ideas come from outside the company. (Goodness, Big Business doesn’t care for innovation inside their companies.)
And like true progressives these days, the author, the topic, the debate is blasting at the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC 2007 in Your Nation’s Capital.
CPAC 2007
Big Ripoff
by Tim Carney
Published by Wiley
Tim was a panelist at CPAC debating America’s Business Elites — Do They Really Believe in Free Enterprise.
After Tim’s compelling presentation, it is clear that Big Business Elites are not good for business.
Charles Koch makes some relevant observations in his book ‘The Science of Success: How Market Based Management Build the World’s Largest Private Company.’
Koch writes:
“The impetus toward regulation and litigation was fueled, in part, by the growing perception that large companies were a collection of scheming individuals who, rather than contributing to prosperity, were using dishonest means and the political and legal systems to unjustly enrich themselves.”
“…Society certainly has the power to enact laws. But for those laws to contribute to prosperity rather than undermine it, they must, among other things, be applied equally to all. A company should not be exempt from environmental emissions laws because it is small or favored politically. We believe that to have a free and prosperous society, people must be treated according to their individual merits, not by group association. Likewise, all businesses should be equal before the law and not treated differently because of size, profitability, industry or political influence.”
Liberal elites? Seriously?
I’m an arch-conservative, but let’s be honest here: Duplicitous business practices in America 2007 cross all party lines. You’ll find gross malfeasance in every camp.
The “liberal elites” mantra is a disingenuous smokescreen. It creates strawmen that the guilty can hide behind.