I Find Worker Voting Intimidation by Employers Very Disturbing

Just wanted to share this post at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. It is a listing of stories of employers threatening consequences against their employees if Obama is elected. This is a small example of how widening inequality makes the US less democratic and a clear example of how market results lead to political power and influence. I also find it more evidence that CEOs don't know a damn thing about how systemic level action effects growth, I find it highly implausible that Romney would be better for business in the long run than Obama, though it obviously seems so if you have crude, intuitive models of how the economy works in your head. No reason to expect most business owners would have anything else since they are used to acting within a given environment rather than thinking about how to construct the environment within which action takes places.

As a side note, I'd also like to note that this is a clear violation of classical liberal principles. Despite a long running propaganda campaign to reframe classical liberalism as a doctrine of unfettered markets, it is more accurately described as trying to create separate spheres within which action happens. So economic action should be distinct from political action. Since these spheres necessarily interact to some degree this is obviously a utopian vision but crude violations of it such as this show that power is increasingly weighing towards the side of strong economic actors being able to violate the separate spheres of everyone else.