I missed Tom Friedman’s column the other day that said that what makes America successful is not big business, but that we have a governmental structure with basic integrity that regulates business interests. You should read it for yourself. For the past few years, I’ve come increasingly to believe in the argument that Friedman makes, or my own variation of it. If you give government unchecked power, it turns into something awful like the old Soviet system or any number of other examples that we could cite. If you give business or any other powerful private party unchecked power, you get exploitation on any number of levels. Either situation is terrible for the regular guy. I have a theory that the business climate is better under Democrats than Republicans because Republicans let big business (and small business) get away with whatever it wants, and generally people in business don’t know what’s good for them in the long term. Democrats let business get away with almost everything, but there is some regulatory impulse there that keeps companies from totally running amok. I have no economic evidence to back this up, but if I were a professional economist who did research for living instead of a programmer and writer who spends way too much time working on the projects I get paid for, I’d be looking into it.