Daniel Gross is a Progressive Douchebag

If Rush Limbaugh wrote the Political Correctness column for Salon, then Gross writing on business might make sense. Counterprogramming is always interesting. You assign Tom Cruise to write about personal economics and G. Gordon Liddy to write about hippies. Cruise never had to save a dime. And Liddy never danced the wiggly spiderlady dance at a Phish or Grateful Dead show. So when they write they are fish out of water and don't go over the heads of their readers. The danger is that they will aim too low, about the level of the reader's bunghole. And along those lines who do Newsweek and Slate choose to write their business columns? They hire a progressive douchebag so unthinking about his class-warfare assumptions that he happily accepts fascism and corporatism as if they were principles of the "free" market.

His latest article is about progressive CEOs, by which he means business owners who buy into the whole global warming swindle for selfish reasons, or because they're scared to death of being put out of business by the government if they don't play along. For example, here is what one selfish businessman thinks about the government forcing ordinary people to pay tons of money for gas.

Andrew Taylor, the CEO of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, in many ways epitomizes the business establishment. His family is No. 32 on the Forbes 400, their $7 billion fortune built on allowing middle-class people to drive cheaply. He donates mostly to Republican candidates. But when it comes to energy prices, he holds a heretical view. In the past year, gas has swung from $4 to $2.50 a gallon, which has made it difficult for auto manufacturers (and rental companies) to predict whether consumers will desire fuel-sipping compacts or fuel-burning SUVs. It strikes Taylor that if the government were to guarantee a stable gas price of between $3 and $4 per gallon—through a high national gas tax like they have in Europe, for example—it might spur innovation and hasten the shift to electric cars. "Consumers would know what kind of car they want to buy, and manufacturers would know what to build," he says.

A few years ago, such talk—looking to European-style intervention in an iconic American market, passing on higher prices to consumers—would have been enough to mark Taylor as a traitor to his CEO class. But Taylor is what you might call a progressive businessman.

Isn't that special? Clearly Taylor would like it better if people rented more cars, and the way to do that would be to lower the price of gas. So in reality he would rather the US's philosophy were Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. But if the idiotic government is going to prevent Americans from using their own natural resources then at least it could make the price of gas predictable so that businesses can plan for it. Plus energy companies love the idea of selling essentially nothing to a captive market and getting paid for it. That's what carbon credits are: nothing. And we are the captive market whose pockets are going to be picked by doubling our electric bills.

That makes sense. However, it is not an argument for progressive principles in business, but for adaptation to political fads and fashions. Under the horrible economic meddling of the current legislative and executive branches, we are in a fascist moment so companies need to play along, much like companies played along with the Italian fascists and the German Nazis. Energy companies like Exelon and BrightSource can make as much money under the new regime with a non-functional product and massive Government grants as they can selling energy that is taxed to death. Apple chooses the progressive side because it has long been the fashionable computer company, and nothing is as fashionable as progressivism and its spinster aunt Marxism.

After all, smart douchebag elitists like to think they can run the whole economy better than all the peons who spend their money and time in the economy can. Typical progressive douchebags.

Let's think about this. What would be the perfect way to run an economic system? How about to have everybody in the world focusing on their own speciality, watching for when supplies contract and finding substitutes or new sources of supply to bring into the system? When people put in extra effort they are compensated by letting them charge more. If something is more plentiful in one part of the world, then more people get together and make products out of it. They then cooperate with someone who has transportation and ship it to other parts of the world. Eventually improvements are made to products that incorporate components from all over the world. They improve the quality and lower the cost, and thereby the price of the consumer product that is sold to ordinary people who take it home and use it with their families. People who do a lousy job on their own are taken on by other, more successful producers and thereby become proxy members of the economy. They might even learn something in case they want to step up and try something on their own again. Over time, as producers experiment with improvements in their methods and raw ingredients their products get better and cost fewer working hours for consumers to buy. Imagine a pencil.

Now that would be one hell of a way to make an economy work, wouldn't it? Or you could let the king set the price of bread and give a monopoly on the sale of bread to his retarded brother in law. In which case you will be required by law to buy moldy, hard, black bread and spend $20 per loaf, until the price goes up.

That's what happens when the progressives take over. They want to act like they are the freaking king and everyone else who doesn't have the political connections is a peasant whose job is to labor for the glory of the state and thank the king when he gets whipped for being slow with his tax payments.

Progressives? More like cavemen economists. More like tyrants. More like Louis the frakking XVI. More like the madness of King George III. Is this the progressive movement America ordered, a regression to King George III? Shit, didn't we have a frakking Revolution against George III? Who are these damn Progressive Douchebags anyway, Lord North plotting a way to return the Colonies to the tender oversight of the British Crown?