Businessmen sell us everything we need, and provide the jobs we need to buy those same things we make from them. While they are at it, they sell us credit to cover the difference between what we earn and what we buy. Our entire economic existence is in the hands of people who don't really need us as individuals (we are after all, interchangeable, replaceable, indistinguishable production and consumption units as far as they are concerned). This is not a value judgment or a moral statement, it's just the nature of the economic relationship between us. If I were a businessman, I would have no choice but to operate by the same rules.

However, they do need us collectively, because without their employees and customers they are as helpless as a queen bee without workers, or a general without privates. So even though they have an enormous impact on the economic lives of their customers and workers (as well as their stockholders and suppliers and creditors), they continue with this fiction that we are all little independent units "free" to simply alter our economic life at will.

They jealously preserve the right to have full control of the economic process and to manage their fellow citizens as customers and workers, but squeal like little piggies when we return the favor with government, unions, boycotts or strikes.

The truth is we both need each other, neither can exist without the other; just as an army needs both privates and generals, and as far as society is concerned, business is the mechanism by which capitalist society organizes itself to provide the goods, services and jobs it needs in order to function and survive. But they work for US, and if they do a good job, they deserve a decent reward. If they get greedy, they need to be spanked. And they need to be watched like a hawk, too, because they're only in it for the money.

From their point of view, business is a private game they play with other businessmen as a form of personal self-actualization. We don't play with them, so we don't really count as real people, and we're not too bright, either (or we'd be businessmen too, right?).

Needless to say, I can see why you would rather not talk to TB about this. I've tried to explain it all to him many times, but he just refuses to listen to reason.