The wages of negligence

The president has gained a reputation for being hostile to business. He needs to change it ...

WINSTON CHURCHILL once moaned about the long, dishonourable tradition in
politics that sees commerce as a cow to be milked or a dangerous tiger to be shot. Businesses are
the generators of the wealth on which incomes, taxation and all else depends; the strong horse that pulls the whole cart , as Churchill put it. No sane leader of a country would want businesspeople
to think that he was against them, especially at a time when con dence is essential for the recovery.
From this perspective, Barack Obama already has a lot to answer for. A president who does so little to counter the idea that he dislikes business is, self-evidently, a worryingly negligent
chief executive. No matter that other Western politicians have publicly played with populism more dangerously, from France’s laissez-faire is dead president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to Britain’s capitalism kills competition business secretary, Vince Cable (see page 68); no matter that talk on the American
right about Mr Obama being a socialist is rot; no matter that Wall Street’s woes are largely of its own making. The evidence that American business thinks the president does not understand
Main Street is mounting. A Bloomberg survey this week found that three-quarters of American investors believe he is against business. The bedrock of the tea-party movement is angry small-business owners. The Economist has lost count of the number of prominent chief executives, many of them Democrats, who complain privately that the president does not understand their trade��that
he treats them merely as adornments at photocalls and uses teleprompters to talk to them; that he shows scant interest in their views on which tax cuts would persuade them to hire people; that his team is woefully short of anyone who has had to meet a payroll (there are fewer businesspeople in this White House than in any recent administration); and that regulatory