I like Alan Zaremberg, the President of the California Chamber of Commerce. He is a thoughtful man in a very difficult position. He knows he should be for small government and free enterprise, but he oversees the Chamber of Commerce in California, home of the Democratic National Socialist Party. One wrong step, and the next thing he knows, union thugs are calling CalPERS and CalPERS then threatens his board members with disinvestment. Think of this, you are on the board of a Fortune 500 company, and the largest institutional investor on the planet (CalPERS) calls you and says if you don’t control that guy at the California Chamber, CalPERS will pull its investment in your company. You have nightmares about the drop in your stock price, so you call Zaremberg and tell him to get with the program. Zaremberg toes the line.
Zaremberg did it again this week. Vote for the tax increase bill, and we’ll support you, says Zaremberg. He doesn’t make it partisan. He says it’s a tough vote for Democrats and Republicans, and we’ll support them all, he says. But the implication is–We’ll protect you Republicans if you vote for the tax increase.
If history has any lessons (and for you who are new in the Legislature due to term limits, you should do the research), the Chamber is an unreliable protection. They will always have an excuse as to why they can’t help, but their promise to help lasts until the vote is taken, and then it is gone. They won’t be there when it’s time.
It’s not their fault. They rely on their members for the money, and their members sometimes are just as invested in the Democrats as they are the Republicans. They also really don’t get politics. Legislators should go along to get along, they say. What’s this I hear about political principles, they will say. Those are irrelevant. Fighting for the right thing is secondary to making sure my business makes a profit, or so the captains of industry believe.
In his book, Socialism, Ludwig Von Mises wrote that it was unreasonable to expect an association of entrepreneurs, or an association that relies upon entrepreneurs to take a principled stand against socialism. The entrepreneur succeeds by overcoming economic barriers, not by engaging in long political fights with those who erect the barriers. He or she doesn’t have the time to engage in a political fight. So it is up to those of us who have chosen this as our way of life to engage in that fight to fight the fight on their behalf.
No reason to get mad at them. No reason to threaten them. We are not warriors for liberty because we like businesses or their leaders. We are warriors for liberty because that is the most important fight of our life, and it is the best for our state and country. We fight, regardless of who joins or opposes us. We fight because we love our children, and we want to hand to them a country worth living in, even if the Chamber doesn’t want to fight.
In my time in the Legislature, I once lamented the Republicans relationship with the business community. The Democrats married the unions for their political future, and they have a faithful partner. Republicans married the business community, and the business community sleeps around. That is the way it is, and will be. We are not faithful to the business community, we are faithful to our principles, to our commitments, to our promises.
But don’t trust the business community, and don’t trust the Chamber. They won’t be there when you need them. Ask Roger Niello, Mike Villines, or the countless others who ended their political career thinking they had the support of the business community.
Trust to your principles. Do the right thing first, the politics will take care of themselves, and the Chamber will follow. That is the right thing to do, and guess what, you will succeed in politics.