Republicans are anti-business

The right wing is still pushing the message, "government is bad, people are good." Less government, lower taxes, more freedom, let free markets work.

The message "government is bad" resonates because, since WWII, our government and wealth have often been directed toward doing things government does not do well. There has also been a successful effort on the part of unions to protect government jobs and paychecks while reducing accountability, which has not been good PR.

But the pointed message "government is bad" has been co-opted as propaganda by radical right wing think tanks that have an entirely different agenda which is being fed to the American people by political puppets. Simply stated, their goal is to reintroduce hardship as a means to improve productivity, and encourage corporate culture to become America's culture.

Which is not bad in and of itself, as long as we are able to have a discussion about what is involved. But we are lazy and we are easily misled and the issues take work and they are hard.

Before we throw out rules and regulations and limit government, we need a real conversation about what will take its place. What will limit the power of those who can and will take advantage of other people's weakness?

"Free markets" without rules that keep as many players as possible in the game aren't free at all. Markets are not "moral." They can't be nor should they be. At best, we hope they are efficient at providing the products and services we want at the lowest possible cost through the mechanism of competition.

Without enough players, and that number varies by industry, markets become captive to the most powerful. Then the powerful take advantage of the rest of us.

In some "markets," such as health care, even the lowest possible cost is probably still more than we can afford when we attempt to postpone death as long as possible. Everyone is being false when we debate only cost and affordability without acknowledging the spiritual issue that Death is inevitable and hard. Horrific manipulation from the right (death panels!) only served to hide the fact that the Republican agenda is a fast track to the same destination. Again, not to disagree with the direction, but the dishonestly is breathtaking.

Or the "markets" in communication. There has been more than one revolution in the telecommunications industry since AT&T, then called "Ma Bell," was broken up (by government regulation). These revolutions would have been far different, and less likely, had Ma Bell's monopoly continued.

Now we have different technologies, and different requirements. But monopolies, or duopolies, or oligopolies still seek power and profit and the power that profit provides. As they should. The corporation has a duty only to itself.

The entity that stands between abuse of corporate power is government. Our system of laws is the "playing field" on which we play the economic game. It doesn't work if one player is able to walk up to any other player at any time and say, "give me all your money."

Which is what AT&T and Exxon and UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Goldman Sachs and Pfeizer and Monsanto are trying to achieve.

They don't want "free" markets, they want your money. Truly efficient markets would mean competition, which would keep costs down and limit how much they could take. So they attempt to reduce the government that could keep markets healthy.

So the Republicans who do their bidding (Bohner, Bachmann, etc.) don't like "free markets" either. They undermine government's role, or work to prohibit government from regulating industries that seek to monopolize our life blood services such as fuel, communication, health care, money and food.

Yes, price controls and direct government interference can do more harm than good. And government screws it up often enough. But let's not forget that government is not the only power, and that many laws are designed first and foremost to protect the public from robbery, either by a thug in a hoody or a Harvard grad in an expensive suit.

Successful efforts (by conservatives and liberals) to repeal banking laws that were enacted after the Great Depression, along with a failure to regulate new financial instruments, and a cultural change ("Borrow money against your house to buy ... toys! You deserve it!") promoted by banks led to the deep recession we have not yet survived.

Look at how much is spent on lobbying, by whom, and how the supreme court (why hasn't Clarence Thomas been impeached?) allowed corporations to hide their influence and spend as much as they like to upend "democracy."

There is an incoherence among a population that wants less government but more services. That incoherence is being manipulated by some very smart and greedy people who know that government is the last warden protecting the average American from a corporatist culture that views our nest egg as food.

And they are being aided unintentionally by a Left Wing that hates other people's money and thinks that good intentions are more powerful than the laws of economics.