Big Buslness and the Gang of Four

All this comes to mind on reading the tantrum thrown by His Messianic Majesty Ralph I following the congressional defeat of an Office of Consumer Representation, which was designed to protect the consumer from himself by an army of bureaucrats.

"The corrupting influence of Big Business has never been more clear than in the last few days," he fumed as he saw his hopes of being crowned Grand Protector shattered, too inept to realize that not big business, but the grassroots consumer has had his bellyful of bureaucratic zealots regulating everything but his sex life, and maybe even that.

Not long before that, his protege Carter had displayed the same ineptness when he accused greedy Big Business of having somehow pressured Congress into rejecting his program of oil and gas strangulation as if the consumer and small businessman had not by now realized that regulation deprives him of fuel and energy.

Big Business, like Mme. Ching, is simply being cast in the ever useful role of a devil.

Now it might be thought from the absurdity of the charges against Ching that she must be innocent. Not so: What Comrade Ching did for decades onto others, she is now getting done unto herself.

Similarly, it should not be concluded that Big Business, just because Nader vilifies it, must necessarily be a nice guy. It isn't always. It always pays lip service to free enterprise, but all too often it prefers the shelter of government regulation to the competitive struggle in the marketplace. Why else do the airlines object to coming out from under the cozy wing of the CAB? Why else are the railroads trying to kill the slurry pipelines, not with cheaper coal transportation, but with legislation? It is not big business, but the consumer who benefits from the free enterprise system, and it will be the consumer, not big business, who will have to save it.

If he fails, he will not just get a shoddy product at a high or unattainable price, as consumers do in the planned economies; he may also lose his political freedom to those who know what is good for him.

Here, too, we can draw an example from the glorious People's Republic of China. Last December its Minister of the Interior lectured on the crimes of the Gang of Four, and how they had abused their power. But now things would be different, and he called on his fellow experts on human rights with the following memorable admonition: "People should be arrested, and especially executed, with discretion."