A Simple Question: Is it Possible for a Successful Business Person to be a Socialist?

[jda]

The Community Organizer-in-Chief's latest evidence of his extreme, left-wing, socialist religion suggest two questions.

[Izzy Dunne]

maybe I did imply that people like it when the govt takes down their competition, but I didn’t mean it in a bad way.

< chuckle > Well, I don't see how you could mean that in a good way, but whatever.

I was responding to the idea that "Businessmen [i.e., any and all] hate competition and will do anything to remove it, including government interference", which sounds like something out of an Occupy Someplace manifesto.

[dfwgator]

“What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.” - Arthur Jensen (Network)

[jda]

Thanks for the responses.

It is obvious that a successful business person can be a socialist and some socialists have held real jobs. But, I think it’s a matter of statistics. From my experience, most successful business people (particularly small business owners that own businesses that actually generate a product - the engine of our economy) are conservatives and most socialists have never held a real, private sector job.

[Sam Gamgee]

Sure it is. What about the business elite that keep pushing us to ignore China's human rights abuses in order to trade with the Communist regime? Or the characters in the Atlas Shrugged novel that stood by while basic freedoms were eroded in America. Ford was big on social engineering. The Rockerfellar family is all for one world government.

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

“Inheritors of wealth seem to be more likely to be socialist than the initial creator of wealth.”

Agree. We’ve seen this. There’s a piece of guilt over the unearned wealth as well.

An owner of a more mature business may or may not be as smart or savvy as the one who created the enterprise; A more mature business is arguably more vulnerable to competition just because it has been around for longer, naturally breeding imitators. The inheritor of same may be perfectly as savvy as the originator but applies that “wisdom” to preservation versus creation. And, one could argue that in an earlier era, it took less smarts to create a business than wangling one’s way through the current maze of regs that impinge upon the business.

And, I completely omitted mention of the “crony” type of capitalist who seeks to utilize the influence of government to protect their enterprise from competition. Others posted about this phenom.

[onedoug]

“The hypocrites are taking over everything.”

[windcliff]

Yeah that’s what I read in chapter 98.

[Colofornian]

Well...in what order? Mitt was 1st a successful businessman...then a successful socialist healthcare pioneer...

[RedMDer]

Click the link. The Republic you save may be your own.

[ichabod1]

Well, beating the competition is kind of the goal, isn’t it?

[ctdonath2]

Seems it’s the norm in China.

[Izzy Dunne]

Well, there's a difference between beating the competition and begging/coercing/hiring a thug government to do it for you.

The original post (that I responded to) made it sound like all businessmen hated all competition and would do anything to destroy it, a position right out of Occupy Uranus.