Stickybuffalo.com

I’m mostly going to bother posting this just because hey, “our” President is in the White House at present and in all honesty, we might as well enjoy that as much as possible, particularly now with so many other government offices taken away from “us.”

And with that in mind I do want to credit Obama for delivering what seems to me like an excellent argument today, one I’d sure like to hear more often:

…when standards like these have been proposed in the past, opponents have often warned that they would be an assault on business and free enterprise. [...]

Early drug companies argued the bill creating the FDA would “practically destroy the sale” of “remedies in the United States.” That didn’t happen. Auto executives predicted that having to install seat belts would bring the downfall of their industry. It didn’t happen. The president of the American Bar Association denounced child labor laws as “a communistic effort to nationalize children.” That’s a quote.

Exactly. This applies to pretty much every progressive advance, ever, really. Medicare, right to form unions, clean air laws, votes for, well, pretty much every group to which the franchise has ever been extended. Generally, reactionaries seem to get a free pass on this… as I’ve noted and as NPR (and to be fair, many others) demonstrated again today by burying this at the end of a post in their politics-nerd blog where we can be sure it will be read by as few people as possible… but hey, it still seems worth at least trying to make this point a little bit more often.

Unless it isn’t. I mean, I like hearing this and it seems persuasive to me, but knowing me as we do, that could actually be evidence that this line of argument is absolutely futile with the “average voter.” I don’t know.

But thank you anyway, Mr. Obama. As long as you felt it necessary to reach out to the odious U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which some of America’s most popular and successful businesses like, say, a little company called Apple have actually seen fit to distance themselves from) it’s heartening that you were unwilling to check reality at the door.