Daniel Howes is Matt Millen without the Super Bowl rings

by: Eric B.

Fri Jul 06, 2012 at 14:46:05 PM EDT

Is there anything more insufferable than the smugness of a Daniel Howes column?

Also hard to overstate is what approval of the ballot questions would mean for the rehabilitation of Michigan's image as an up-and-coming place to invest, to do business and to create jobs in partnership with organized labor, not the discredited model of confrontation. What would it mean? Not much good.

That's why eight business groups, including the Michigan, Detroit and Grand Rapids chambers, Business Leaders for Michigan and the Small Business Association of Michigan, formed Citizens Protecting Michigan's Constitution as a bulwark against labor- and corporate-backed constitutional carve-outs and government by referendum.

They don't want to go backward, don't want to see a labor-backed amendment to the constitution gut cost-saving reform, don't want the optimistic climb out of Michigan's Malaise imperiled. The auto meltdown and the aftershocks of the national recession presupposed a new, cooperative relationship between management and labor, particularly in the private sector.

For a business writer, it is increasingly evident to me that Daniel Howes knows fuck-all about how businesses operate or what makes them grow. I have never once seen anything in anything he's ever written about the role of actual customers and the role they play in the supply-and-demand relationship in stimulating business growth, or that business costs are simply passed along to them in the form of higher prices.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about here, two years ago, the state Legislature repealed item pricing at the behest of the big retailers. Their reasoning was that item pricing did very little to aid consumers, but drove up costs tremendously. If they could get rid of item pricing, they could reduce shelf prices on goods. Has that happened? Of course it hasn't. The reason for that is that shelf price of most goods was already at such a point that consumers weren't shocked out of buying them.  When item pricing was repealed, costs for businesses went down, jobs were eliminated, but the cost savings were pocketed. Why? Because there wasn't any market pressure to do so. In other words, you can talk until the sun goes down and the cows go home about "cutting costs," but unless said cost cutting is done in a way that stimulates sales or consumer activity (i.e. upselling a pine tree air freshener to go along with your "King" car wash), you're not really doing anything to help the business grow. You're just doing stuff to make it easier for the business owner to pocket more of the money (there isn't anything wrong with profits, mind you, just as there's nothing wrong with asking businesses to contribute tax money to support infrastructure and services they require, and just as there's nothing wrong with paying public sector workers a wage that compensates them for their time and education, and rewards them for choosing public service over private aspirations).

Further, the Chamber of Commerce represents businesses the way the Farm Bureau represents farms. It supports the old, big giants against newcomers. Just as the Farm Bureau has regularly backed policies intended to stifle competition in the marketplace (and that consumers increasingly want, if you judge them by trends in food purchasing), the Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly gotten behind policies intended to support Big Business to the detriment of the small businesses everyone says are going to be an integral part of tomorrow's economy.

You get the feeling that Howes thinks they way he does because he's fallen for the old bugaboo that someone has to be a good businessperson because they've made a lot of money. This is the old canard that all wealthy individuals are self-made, that none of them were the benefactors of luck, genuine or manufactured, or that any of them inherited their fortune from family or had it passed down within a business, or that they've simply figured out how to climb onto the backs of giants and bellow like they're king of the mountain.

As for his point that we're now having a right to work debate because union leaders brought it, Howes seems content to try to play one off the other, pretending that private sector unions are okay with everything even as he notes that Bob King of the UAW is one of the chief architects of this year's union fight. Of course, he mentions not any of the clearly punative anti-union legislation passed by this Legislature and signed by this governor, who he notes wants to avoid a fight (naturally, to not reinforce that Michigan always labors under the iron boot of labor leaders), and certainly doesn't explain why labor leaders and rank-and-file are supposed to have simply rolled over and accepted these without fighting back. There may be a reason for that.