privatize profit and socialize loss

Matt Stoller, a blogger with Open Left, comes up with the a very good classification of those claiming business-driven political orientations:

There are roughly two cultural parts of the business community. One is the “managerial” sector, the corporate group that took power during the Reaganite era and is basically illiberal in orientation. These are the people who are running companies like General Motors into the ground of out fealty to ideological right-wing class solidarity. … These people are becoming independents or depoliticized. Their ideas don’t work, and their very identities as masters of the universe is shown as a sad and tragic lifelong fraud …

The second group is “entrepreneurial” in culture, not large and corporate. This is the group that sees new industries in green technology, and will swing to a liberal model of governance … This sector is where our new governance models are going to come from, though the political piece is really our job and the policy details will come from emerging public spiritedness in academia. Building the bridges between the business left and the open left is going to take 20 years, but it’s starting to happen.

The practicality of this classification comes from both its predictive-, and ideology-b.s. detecting-capabilities. So many anti-capitalist, state-interventionists for business ends, demagogues call themselves as being pro-business and anti-government that it makes one wonder. The answer is simple: privatize profit and socialize loss, the rest is ideology.

Also, check out the comments to Matt's blog from NYT!