First Labor - Then Capital

Big hat tip to The KrugMan

This is kind of funny: Eric Cantor feels the need to explain to his fellow Republican legislators that most Americans not only don’t own their own businesses, they have no desire to own their own businesses. It’s a message he’s apparently having a hard time getting across.

But I’m surprised that none of the commentary I’ve seen mentions Cantor’s own infamous tweet on Labor Day 2012, when he took the occasion to honor … business owners:

   Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.

 From The Washington Monthly link in Krugman's piece:

The deeper problem is that most conservatives simply do not believe wage-slaves contribute anything that matters to the economy. And this, as Paul Waldman notes at the Prospect today, reflects and reinforces a moral valuation of Americans as divided into producers and parasites:

   We all believe that some people are just more important than others, and for conservatives, no one is more important than business owners. Remember how gleeful they were when President Obama said “you didn’t build that” when discussing businesses during the 2012 campaign? Sure, he was taken out of context (he was talking about roads and bridges, not the businesses themselves), but Republicans genuinely believed they had found the silver bullet that would take him down. He had disrespected business owners! Surely all America would be enraged and cast him from office! They made it the theme of their convention. They printed banners. They wrote songs about it. And they were bewildered when it didn’t work….

--and--

But if your mindset is such that the only alternative to deification (Waldman’s term) of big business is deification of small business, it will be difficult for you to develop an agenda attractive to people who don’t own businesses at all, particularly if that requires acknowledgement that labor contributes as much to the success of enterprises as capital. Abandon that rampart, and before you know it, you’re acknowledging the legitimacy not only of government regulation of entrepreneurs on behalf of their empoyees, but of unions! And that way lies socialism, obviously.