10.18.10
Made in China: The whine of the US businessman
Opinion headline in today’s Wall Street Journal: Stop Bashing Business, Mr. President.
Ken Langone, the alleged co-founder of Home Depot, is peeved. Mandatory health insurance for his employees! Rapacious trial lawyers!
“If we tried to start The Home Depot today, under the kind of onerous regulatory controls that you have advocated, it’s a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground,” Langone writes.
You mean to tell us there would be one less giant chain store — the kind lampooned in various famous cartoon series — selling nothing but goods made exclusively in China, toilet seats, hardwares and such, staffed by grossly underpaid Wal-Mart-type workers?
And that would have been bad?
DD has an app for that.
Langone cues the fiddles and his Horatio Alger story:
[You] seem obsessed with repealing tax cuts for “millionaires and billionaires.” Contrary to what you might assume, I didn’t start with any advantages and neither did most of the successful people I know. I am the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty. My parents worked tirelessly to build on that opportunity. My first job was as a day laborer on the construction of the Long Island Expressway more than 50 years ago.
DD is the grandson of immigrants who came to this country seeking basic economic and personal liberty.
It seemed like the thing for them to do — nothing more, nothing less.