Idiot left-enablers in the business community screw the little guy.

From OpinionJournal comes the story of every socialist's favorite capitalist, the useful idiot.

Tax-Me-More Corporatists

Conservatives suffered two excruciating defeats at the polls this month --both of which can be attributable to botching the tax issue thanks to pro-tax business interests. In both of these instances -- in Colorado and Virginia -- the business lobbyists teamed with liberal interest groups to defeat conservative candidates and ballot initiatives. This raises the question: Is the Republican coalition crumbling?

In Colorado, taxpayer groups lost the bid to save the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR), which for the past ten years has restrained state budget and tax growth to the rate of inflation and population growth. But when popular Republican Governor Bill Owens joined hands with business groups, bond traders, road builders, and developers to push for the neutering of TABOR, the liberal pro-spending factions had just enough support to win with 52% of the vote, thus gutting TABOR. As Jon Caldera, head of the pro-TABOR campaign, put it: "When two-thirds of the business money is funding the pro-tax position, we're in big trouble." He also notes that almost every business group, including the powerful Chambers of Commerce, joined the pro-tax and spend liberal coalitions.

The same fissures emerged in Virginia, explaining how this red state elected another Democrat, Tim Kaine, to the governor's mansion on Tuesday. For the past 3 years, the high tech business community has linked hands with developers and liberal Democrats to push sales tax hikes, gas tax hikes, and more state spending on roads and schools -- even though a report by the Virginia Policy Institute shows that this state has more than doubled expenditures on transportation and education over the past decade.

Republican Jerry Kilgore lost the governor's race in large part because pro-tax business coalitions pressured him into an ambiguous position on taxes. As we mentioned on these pages a week ago, Mr. Kilgore never took a "no tax" pledge, and seemed insensitive to the stampeding cost of property taxes in many counties. His Democratic opponent Mr. Kaine ran as an anti-tax "friend of the taxpayer" even though he had just two years earlier supported the largest tax hike in Virginia history. As Peter Ferrara, head of Virginia Free Enterprise Fund, groused the day after the election: "The business groups who fund these state campaigns prevented Kilgore from running as a tax cutting conservative, and now they are stuck with an anti-business Democrat."

This trendy impulse in the business community of supporting pro-tax candidates appears to be spreading throughout the country. In Michigan, for example, industry groups are splintering from Republicans in the legislature in order to seek special tax breaks and corporate welfare handouts.

In the end, the Chamber of Commerce folks and the Fortune 500 lobbyists don't seem to understand that, when they help elect pro-tax Democrats, they also elect a slate of anti-free trade, pro-regulation and class warfare candidates. These newly elected politicians are like scorpions: They will sting the very business groups who helped carry them into the winner's circle at their earliest convenience. Conservatives can hardly be blamed if they refuse to rescue the corporatist turncoats from this fate.
-- Stephen Moore