Evidently, that's what business leaders are saying.
Call it paranoid. Call it smart business. But how can anyone ignore the way the Obama administration attacks those who displease it? After watching what President Obama did to Chrysler's creditors, and his promises of skyrocketing electricity prices and bankrupt power plants, how could any businessman not be concerned?
We were told that George Bush was the dictator we needed to fear, that he was "shredding the Constitution" and "taking away our civil liberties." Yet it's hard to compare treatment of terrorists to the way the POTUS wants to treat ordinary American business owners. You know, the ones that employ people. Except that the President doesn't seem particularly concerned about unemployment.
More at Tigerhawk:
Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress have expressed an intention to intensively regulate, in one fashion or another, virtually the entire private economy. The only defense is to hope that they cannot shoot at all the targets before their political strength begins to wane, so the goal is to keep your business or industry as far down their list as possible. There is an enormous premium on keeping your head down, more than at any time since FDR went to war against American business in the 1930s.
For those who have forgotten what FDR did to American businesses during the Depression, the National Industrial Recovery Act forced businesses to comply with thousands of regulations (such as wage and price controls) and strongarmed whole industries into unionizing. In the famous Schechter Poultry case, the Supreme Court invalidated industrial codes of fairness competition, and that the NIRA ceded too much power to the executive branch.
But Democrats, who love the New Deal, see no problems with the type of "fairness" advocated by government control. Which is why business leaders are concerned.
UPDATE: Thomas Tallis sneers at the idea that business owners are being treated on par with terrorists. The difference, of course, is that business owners haven't attacked the United States. But who can blame company owners for being a little paranoid when the car dealerships which were shuttered gave largely to the GOP?
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