Who said this?
We are pro-growth. We are fierce advocates for a thriving, dynamic free market. But we do think that there have to be some rules of the road in place in the financial sector that will create an even playing field and allow businesses to raise capital and consumers to buy products with confidence.
Coming out of this past decade, there has been a sense on the part of a lot of middle-class families that they have been left behind, even when we were expanding. And I talked during the campaign about the need for us to restore a sense of balance to the compact between business, government, and employees all across the country.
If businesses are making record profits but employees are seeing their wages flatline—and in fact, incomes decline over the course of the decade—that puts enormous strains on families. It puts, I think, a dampening effect on consumers who help drive this economy. We are going to be better off if everybody feels like they have got a stake in growth and innovation moving forward. And I think that balance got lost.
Now, making sure that we restore that balance without tipping too far in the other direction in ways that squelch innovation and investment is going to be an important challenge, and one that we take very seriously. But the important message I would have for the business community—and this is something that I emphasize every time I have lunch with CEOs, and we have had a lot of them in here—is we have every interest in you succeeding.
Another big hint below the fold.
In the international marketplace, the more the American brand and American products and American services are thriving, the better off we are going to be and, by the way, the better off I will look as President of the United States.
Did you read President Obama’s interview with Al Hunt and others, in Business Week? You don’t read Business Week?
Maybe it’s time to start paying real careful attention to what’s really going on, even by reading some of the mainstream journals.
Why haven’t the conservative bloggers jumped all over this interview?
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The reason that conservative bloggers have been avoiding this topic is that they reflexively assume that being a Democrat means that one is automatically anti-business, when in fact we are opposed to the sort of free-market business that allows for monopolization of industries. The no-regulation, no-tax form of conservative is a bastardization of the concept of a free market in the first place and since you have been writing about Teddy Roosevelt your readers should check into the way that his form of progressive Republican actually sought truly free markets through the break up of monopolies that were choking commerce and manipulating markets during his era.
If I had been around back then, I would have been a Republican rather than a Democrat. It is interesting to see how the parties shift on important social issues.
When I lived in Dallas, I regularly read Business Week and in fact was there when the magazine endorsed the candidacy of Bill Clinton. My co-workers, largely conservative Republicans, were firmly convinced that the Clintons would socialize the United States and drive business overseas to leave us with a solely service economy. He was going to raise taxes, destroy the health care insurance industry, and take away all of our freedoms and give all the money to the Welfare Queens.
It sounds familiar, and for a liberal Democrat to see an SLC Democrat such as Clinton or a moderate Democrat such as Obama being decried as the “most socialist president we have ever had, is ludicrous and would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that the obstructionism of the Republicans in Congress is preventing any sort of meaningful congressional deliberation from taking place.
A regulated market is a free market, an unregulated market chokes both consumer choice and labor choice and freedoms as the viable employers are swallowed by the giants.
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