You challenged me on my enthusiasm for Joe Hill’s “Rebel Girl.”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_tz3wPgLUw  Didn’t have a good response at the moment, but it got me thinking.  My mind works slower than do those of most people.  Hence the delay.

To my mind, the Democrats are generically anti-business.  Sure, they talk about income inequality and anti-monopoly and this, that, and another New Deals.  But what they mean to apply is an anti-business policy that will fall on all businesses, great and small.  Taxes.  Regulations by decree.  You never see Democrat candidates who have ever worked in/for a business.  You never see ones who have had their own business.  Barack Obama was a “community organizer.”   (George McGovern’s post-presidential experience is instructive here.)  They’ve all spent their lives as lawyers or “in public service.”  Public service is just another way of saying “public employment.”  You don’t get laid off in a recession and you get good benefits.  For following an elaborate set of rules.

They have a fantasy of returning to the Fifties: a few big industries that don’t have any global competition; high wages and good benefits achieved through government-sponsored union-bargaining; owners who inherited their wealth from their rough-and-ready ancestors who actually created it; and a horde of professional managers who deploy B-School-certified skills in return for a generous, but socially-acceptable, salary.  That—at best—is what the Democrats want to recreate.  Basically, Rudolf Hilferding seventy years on.   (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Hilferding )

None of this has anything to do with contemporary reality.  It has been one, but only one, of the factors that have driven the American economy—and society—into the ground over the last fifty years.

Yes, there is a lot to criticize in Republican policies.  Mostly, to my mind, it is the starving/shrinking of the necessary regulatory functions of the Federal bureaucracy.  To take some examples: the IRS can’t audit; the FAA has shifted airline safety to the plane manufacturer (singular); the FDA can’t keep up with the companies trying to poison us for fun and profit.  Theodore Roosevelt theorized that only a strong government could mediate the conflicting demands of Capital and Labor.  Republicans are gutting the system projected by their second-greatest president.  The reduction of the corporation tax to international (i.e. Canada) norms seems to me a good idea.  All the tax cut-spend-elect stuff to counter Democrats’ tax-spend-elect stuff is wrong, but wrong for both parties.  And wrong for the American voters who gobbled it up.   Maybe “snorted” would be better?

As for “bigness,” see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly.  Yes, we’ve been down this road before.

In the end, what I’m fighting for is my Dad and all the people like him.  He didn’t want to work for the government and he didn’t want to work for a giant business.  He had done both (Army, Shell Oil).  He just wanted his own show.  Win or lose, it was on him.   What’s wrong with that?  He provided a service that people wanted.  He paid his employees the best he could.  Wasn’t great money, but it was the same deal for them that he made.  They weren’t working for the government or big business.  There weren’t procedures to deal with.  Just people.  He and my Mom did a lot of unpaid work to make the business run.  I guess I don’t see much difference between my Dad and an artist: they’re both self-actualizing and creative.  Along the way, he put a roof over our head and food in our mouths and paid his taxes.  Some of those taxes went to pay for public competition with his private business.  Why?  Because not all high-school teachers wanted to coach, so some of them would rather work extra as driving instructors.  Teachers had a union, but private business did not.