Bill Murchison demonstrates this particular fallacy in his latest article. Consider the following passage.
"Negativism about business and enterprise is a Democratic trait becoming more engrained all the time. Key Democratic constituencies seem to demand it: the academic-media constituency, which sees businessmen as uneducated rubes, and the labor constituency, which sees business as a race of union-busting oppressors whom you can't trust an inch.
How do you get the presidential nod from such a party? For one thing, you bust business at every opportunity. In making economic proposals, you remember to play down individual creativity and initiative and play up regulatory control. You suggest that basically the only way to make business do what's right is to twirl a federal club over its head.
The Democratic Party isn't expressly or even inferentially socialist. And yet it can communicate anti-business rage or indignation in a way that says to businessmen and to those whose livelihoods depend on a healthy business climate: Uh-oh, trouble."
So can you see what part of the argument Mr. Murchison leaves out? Well, what is business like? He suggests that those who want to attack business are doing it for largely irrational reasons or are doing it to gain political support from largely irrational constituencies. But this only works if you assume that the Business world is largely blameless.
But is the Business world blameless? Well the short answer is no. It turns out businesses do like to screw their workers if they can get away with it. They also like to screw their shareholders on occasion. Take the following example from an article by Arianna Huffington.
"Exhibit A is HealthSouth. Last week, another high-ranking executive at the nation's largest provider of rehabilitative health care services pleaded guilty to routinely cooking the company's books. And this wasn't just happening back in the bad old days when everyone was doing it -- no, theseguys were fraudulently inflating earnings well into 2002, even as Enron,WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco were front page news. How's that for clueless? "
Now I admit that this article originally appeared about a year ago (April 2, 2003, so a year and a month) but I'm pretty sure that the same sorts of people are still running our businesses. We here Republicans complaining a lot about government oversight and anti-Business attitudes. We don't hear them complaining about the importance of playing by the rules and being good corporate citizens.
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