Investor’s Business Daily, The Wall Street Journal and other publications are reporting that businesses are still making profits — perhaps in the trillions, collectively. The problem is, they’re afraid to spend. This includes spending on hiring. Their hope is that the Obama Administration and the Pelosi Congress, and all their hampering of private industry, are temporary; that there will be relief following the next couple of elections. Consequently, they have gone on strike. It’s called a “capital strike” and a similar thing went on during the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his ultraliberal Congress of the 1930s. More likely, it’s simply fear — coupled with recognition that business cannot go on under these conditions.
If there is a strike going on, then I can only say: Good! The Obama Administration and the Pelosi Congress are, in combination, the worst thing to ever happen to American business and capitalism more generally. Enemies of capitalism have been present in both parties. Their names have included Bush, Nixon and Hoover. But nobody has been a more relentless and consistent opponent of capitalism and business — on principled grounds, the grounds they consider ‘morality’ — than Obama and the current political gang who runs Congress. I say: Let it all collapse on their watch. Capitalism cannot long survive the kind of policies they favor anyway. If it flounders or even falls, let it be on their watch. Maybe that way, we’ll finally get an alternative to the quasi-socialism (and now, under Obama, outright socialism) that we’re enduring.