As always, the disagreement always comes in areas that cannot be easily quantified, and it depends a lot on what lenses you filter your world through. No one disputes the advantages of an economic system that harnesses human ambition and is self-regulating through competition. It is indeed the source of all wealth we see about us today. But at the same time, for those of us who feel the purpose of government is to protect us from the abuses of private enterprise, there is always another side of the story.

Harnessed ambition is often frustrated by the corporate absorption of what used to be neighborhood and individual and family businesses. Everything now is a chain, or a franchise or some other huge impersonal bureaucracy. We are also developing a new class of corporate bureaucrats who talk a great free enterprise line but are nothing more than hired professionals, they've never met a payroll or created an innovation, they just job-hop from one office building to another, like hired guns. Competition is great, but every businessman is doing everything he can to avoid competing, whether it be bribing legislators or hammering his rivals into the ground.

America's capitalism was always more successful and humane than Europe's precisely because we were a more Liberal nation; we introduced or developed anti-trust legislation, child-labor laws, public education, 8 hour days and 40 hour weeks, welfare services, social security, product regulations, safety standards,the union movement and a host of other institutions to tame and control the raw energy of capitalism. In spite of bitter opposition from the business community, these reforms contributed greatly to our liberty and our prosperity. The rest of the world followed our lead. Were there excesses and abuses? Of course, but that is the nature of a democracy. It is always in a state of dynamic equilibrium, if it is in equilibrium at all. The comfortable middle-class lifestyle we all aspire to today owes as much to our ancestors getting the crap beat out of them in picket lines as it does to the fearless clever men who put it all on the line to see their business vision come through.

My view has always been that once a business gets too big, it loses sight of that human connection and becomes simply a huge administrative machine to make profit, run by individuals who are not capitalists or entrepreneurs, but bureaucrats and who care about nothing except their own careers, certainly not about customers, employees, or stockholders. It becomes no better than the monster government agencies which have evolved to share the world with these creatures. But our public discourse today insists on splitting the two, ignoring the similarities while stressing the differences. The man in government is a bureaucrat, his counterpart in business is "an executive", even the language is manipulated to maintain the fiction.

Worst of all, every criticism of this corporate bloating is ruthlessly attacked and accused of socialism, or worse, so that it becomes impossible to even reform the system without getting the flag thrown in your face or your loyalty questioned. What's more, social and cultural issues which have nothing to do with economics are manipulated to divide the nation into an arbitrary left and right polarity which obscures economic policy debates with cultural questions. Liberals are sick and tired of being called unpatriotic, pro-crime, pro-taxes, anti-family, immoral and without values, and irreligious (non-religious conservatives never stick their necks out to scold their evangelical and fundamentalist allies, but one day they will turn on you, too. Hark, the barbarians are already at the gates.).

My political philosophy is that big business is just as hazardous to our liberty as is big government, and in this country, which since the age of Nixon has undergone a prolonged conservative episode, this point of view must be constantly questioned and challenged. And when the pendulum finally swings the other way, which it most assuredly will someday, I'll probably change sides and start calling myself a conservative.