Businesses do not exist to create jobs.

[William deB. Mills]

55. Corporations Are People

Thank you for pointing that out. Exactly the context in which I was writing. Citizens United changed the American political system. It is essentially one dollar, one vote (and Romney's Israeli patron who also holds a US passport stated that he will vote an unlimited number of times) until that Supreme Court ruling is somehow rendered irrelevant. My suggestion for doing that would be free TV ads for all presidential candidates and no paid ads, by the way.

Anyway, let me throw out a flat statement, then we can see if it has weaknesses: if being friendly to business means hurting people, the Government should never be friendly to business. Put differently, the government should of course support the business activities deemed beneficial for society but because they are beneficial to society, not because they enrich an individual who will in turn pay bribes to his political buddies. When politicians claim to be pro-business, they are saying they are anti-people. Clearly, when society needs a business (and surely we need thousands of businesses), responsible politicians will support business...but not when they, say, poison the Gulf or gamble away funds that should have been loaned...to business...for socially beneficial production. It is obvious in our society that aiding business does not automatically help people. What about the reverse? Does helping people automatically help business? I would suspect so - if the population is well-off, secure, content, will it not work hard in some business and spend its wealth as customers of some business? The problem, it seems to me, comes when people and business are set as adversaries: that is what Republican policies (e.g., low capital gains taxes, absence of regulation, stock options not connected to company performance) achieve.

I suspect you understand all this at least as well as I, however, so pardon my long-winded response. I just wanted to get a bit more of the detail out in the open. It really bothers me the way mistreating low-paid, hard-working wage earners is somehow construed in the US as patriotic and good for the economy. I know why the rich say such things, but for the life of me I cannot understand why anyone else would believe such propaganda.