Clearly, if ‘pro-business’ carries the requirement that one must be pro-government subsidies, or pro- other taxpayer-financed ‘incentives,’ then Ron Paul will never be considered pro-business. He is decidedly free market, however because he understands that that is the system under which consumers get served best. In the free market the costs, risks, and errors of unsuccessful entrepreneurs are not shifted to successful entrepreneurs, taxpayers, and consumers. And successful businesses (those that supply to consumers what they want, and at a price and quality level they are willing to accept) are not demonized for taking calculated risks and earning profits as reward for hitting a bullseye.
As recent Shaftesbury Society Luncheon speaker Dwight Lee recently argued, the moral case for markets does not depend upon conspicuous charity (his ‘magnanimous morality’), but rather on wealth creation via the ability to create jobs and incomes. But the tremendously powerful ‘mundane morality’ of successful business ventures does not succeed (absent government intervention or rescue) without being a servant to consumer wishes. If you are repelled by the thought of business success being rewarded with profits, or whatever arbitrary notion you hold of the undefinable concept of ‘excess’ profits, you are by definition repelled by the notion of consumers getting more of what they want in exchange for their scarce monetary resources, goods, and labor.
It is a mistake to think that business can achieve its ends in a free market without promoting the ends of consumers. One cannot be ‘for’ one and against the other, by definition. Only government, by intervening into markets with regulations, subsidies, or mandates can disrupt this balance and divide the interests and behaviors of these two sides of the same supply and demand process.
