Under Obamanomics, industry realizes that not everybody wins

The corporate lobby for cap-and-trade is collapsing -- which is what you should expect. My column explains:

Alternating with his disingenuous populist anti-big-business rhetoric, Obama has also offered the opposite: Hope & Change, the-wolf-will-live-with-the-lamb talk of cooperation between business and government.

This cooperation talk is not new. During and after World War I, business giants sought to perpetuate the War Industries Board. WIB member and historian Grosvenor Clarkson described the "contempt" industry leaders had for "the huge hit-and-miss confusion of peacetime industry, with its perpetual cycle of surfeit and dearth" -- replacing competition with government-guaranteed profit....

Big government, unlike the free market, doesn't create wealth -- it redistributes it. In a free market, a rising tide can lift all boats. Under Obamanomics, businesses can rise only by pulling someone under -- usually taxpayers, competitors, consumers or workers.