It really comes down to this:
Posted on 02/17/2021 6:41:27 AM PST by SJackson
In the 2020 election, business lined up squarely on the side of the candidate and party that promised higher taxes (including corporate taxes), a higher minimum wage (which will drive up wages across the board), re-regulation and a Green New Deal, which will send energy costs soaring.
Joe Biden spent his entire adult life in the warm embrace of government. His political career was devoted to attacking capitalism. Donald Trump is not only an unapologetic spokesman for the free market, but a highly successful businessman.
So, when given a choice, the boardroom went with the taker over the maker, with the aristocracy of pull (as Ayn Rand called it) over the aristocracy of profit. Lenin’s old axiom needs to be updated – “We’ll sell capitalists the candidate we’ll use to hang them.”
Republicans are outraged by Corporate America’s betrayal of Middle America. A February 5th editorial in the Wall Street Journal reports: “In 2020, 57% of Republicans said they were satisfied with big business. This year, the number dropped to 31%” – a phenomenon the Journal attributes to the woke culture hitting the corporate suites.
Companies like Amazon and Nike scrabbled aboard the pc bandwagon. Businesses opened their coffers to causes which would have been shunned just a decade ago.
It was borderline hilarious to see these corporate giants bestowing money earned in the free market to groups like Black Lives Matter, one of whose founders proudly proclaimed that she and her colleagues were “trained Marxists.” Perhaps it would have been different if agitators had burned down the Atlanta headquarters of Coca Cola instead of the stores downtown.
For the managerial class, Black Lives Matter is an opportunity for extreme virtue signaling. Why not? They live in gated communities. Their children attend exclusive private schools. They dine at swank eateries like The French Laundry (where the average meal costs $350). Unlike Middle America, they don’t live with the daily reality of arson, assault, intimidation and murder.
In “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time Magazine boasted of how an insider alliance of corporations, labor unions, media and the Democratic establishment in effect fixed the presidential election through massive spending, lobbying and disinformation campaigns.
Time gushed over the “well-funded cabal of powerful people…working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”
When conservatives speak of well-funded cabals of powerful people working behind the scenes, we’re conspiracy nuts who threaten democracy. When the mainstream media does it, they’re celebrating a diverse coalition that saved democracy.
Cabals aside, corporations have been putting their money where their heart is for some time.
Campaign contributions by employees (most upper-management) of tech titans are about as balanced as news coverage on CNN. Netflix employees gave Democrats 98% of their support in 2020, IMB 90% for the party of Bernie and AOC, Google (88%), Apple and PayPal (84%), Amazon (75%), and Facebook (77%).
The one that comes closest to looking like America, Texas Instruments, only gave 60% of its campaign cash to the neo-Marxists. Just 8 years ago, TI’s employees gave 24% of their donations to the Democrats.
Why is business supporting its mortal enemies?
The managerial class was educated at the same academic institutions that indoctrinated the media and political elites -- where they were taught that America is a racist nation, that we should strive for equality of outcomes (instead of equal opportunity) and that inclusion is the road to salvation. They read the same journals and watch the same news shows as the rest of the well-fed sheep.
The marketplace is so messy and unreliable. They prefer working with the bureaucracy to achieve the ends they want.
They’re ashamed of operating for a profit and seek to justify their existence with the coin of social progress. They long to have the establishment bestow on them the coveted title of progressive business leader.
They think their customers are boobs, and that their political maneuvering will be overlooked or soon forgotten.
They view themselves not as Americans but (because they operate internationally) as citizens of the world. From this perspective, what’s good for America must be balanced with what’s good for Honduras, the European Union and the Middle Kingdom. That they grew wealthy and successful in a nation that rewards success and allows for the accumulation of wealth (to a greater degree than any other), is inconsequential to them.
Wait until they see Biden’s impact on business.
Rand used to say, “Brother, you asked for it!” H.L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Today, the common people show more common sense than the hucksters of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.
After the price of their stock plummets, I trust corporate leaders will still be able to afford a good lubricant. They’ll need it.
It really comes down to this:
The millennial morons don’t get that.
They think capitalism = fascism.
Government schools, teaching kids to love government.
Here are seven quotes that reveal how early social reformers viewed the minimum wage and the “unemployable.”
1. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work. Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
– Royal Meeker, Princeton scholar and labor commissioner to Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 25
2. “How to deal with the unemployable?” asked economist Frank Taussig. They “should simply be stamped out.”
“We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind…”
– F. W. Taussig, Principles of Economics, Vol. 1
3. “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by minimum wages,] so would the ineffective workers. I am not disposed to waste much sympathy upon either class. The elimination of the inefficient is in line with our traditional emphasis on free competition, and also with the spirit and trend of modern social economics. There is no panacea that can ‘save’ the incompetents except at the expense of the normal people. They are a burden on society and on the producers wherever they are.”
– A.B. Wolfe, American Economic Review, 1917
4. “Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks.”
–New Republic editorial, 1916 (most likely written by Herbert Croly)
5. Henry Rogers Seager, a leading progressive economist from Columbia University, argued that worthy workers deserve protection from the “competition of the casual worker and the drifter.”
“The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support…..If we are to maintain a race that is to be made up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization . . . .”
– Henry Rogers Seager, Columbia University scholar and future American Economic Association president, in 1913 (quoted from “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”)
6. “[Wage] competition has no respect for the superior races,” said University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons in his 1907 book Races and Immigrants ( p. 151). “The race with lowest necessities displaces others.”
7. “[The minimum wage will] protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese.”
– Arthur Holcombe of Harvard University, a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, speaking approvingly of Australia’s minimum wage legislation in 1912 (quoted from “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”)
When companies reach a certain size and/or deal with government contracts on any level, they basically become an arm of the government. A completely private company with no government contracts often ends up “owned” by the government because it controls the access to foreign goods and labor (if it is part of that business).
If a company has a “chief diversity officer”, it has become too large to escape the “reparations tax” (since that is all it is); it is part of the government, and hiring those unemployables who no longer fit on gubmint payrolls.
It’s long past time to cut big business loose. They aren’t capitalist. They want to crush the middle class and pile wealth into their own grubby mitts.
Conservatives need to jettison the woke corporate class and start making them pay for their support of socialism.
Let them feel the pain of regulation, taxes, ect... and make it so painful that they won’t be able to maintain their stranglehold over the marketplace so that small businesses can reassert themselves once again.
Sometimes I notice things that I feel uncomfortable noticing. One that hit me a couple of years ago was this: Why is it that whenever I have to come into contact with a government worker bee in any major city it is virtually ALWAYS a black woman?
Big business is not your friend. They actively fund the LEFT.
Dump national name brands. Buy local/generic as much as possible.
It is a twofer.
Hurt LEFTIST supporting businesses.
Reduce advertising that supports the LEFTIST media.
The Democrats aren’t socialists/communists.
The Democrats are an organized crime syndicate.
Businesses have to pay them protection money.....or else.
These people are not conservative and have not been since Ronald Reagans day. We lower their taxes and suddenly they don’t need us. They are cosmopolitans who look down on the middle class and our culture with disdain. They know full well that the Democrats are not going to redistribute their income. They are going to redistribute our income to them. One of the biggest fault lines in the Democrat party is the line between these corporate urban cosmopolitan elites and the radical socialists in their lower echelons and base. If we the conservative middle class were to demand that they pay their fair share as they are not than we could drive a wedge between their base and the elites. We would also cause our own GOP elites to stand up and take notice. The only part of Conservative middle class Republicans that have any input is the NRA not because country club GOP elites believe in guns but because they know they will have a tiger by the tail. There is a lesson in this.
“Why is it that whenever I have to come into contact with a government worker bee in any major city it is virtually ALWAYS a black woman?”
Because they are “workfare jobs”; they don’t have job skills, so the gubmint pretends they do. That is why there is so much opposition to privatizing things; they’d all be shown the door. It is straight-up wealth redistribution; I call it the “pseudo-economy”, and in many cities it is the only economy left.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.