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"Whenever the government provides opportunities and privileges for white people and rich people they call it 'subsidies.' When they do it for Negro and poor people they call it 'welfare.'"
Any true titan of American industry should cordially but firmly tell Mike Lee, Orrin Hatch and Donald Trump to shut the heck up. They don't get it. They aren't helping.
And, on a very personal level, the utter contempt those leaders of the Republican Party – the supposed champions of free enterprise — clearly have for the ability of American business to adapt, adopt and improve is insulting bordering on abusive.
And this is, of course, the same crowd that wants to block grant food stamps and slice away at Medicaid because, well, those pansy poor people just need to suck it up and learn to take care of themselves. Any effort the government makes to ease their pain or fill their bellies clearly will just make them weaker in the long run.
Lee, particularly, has trapped himself in an intellectual quandary by looking for non-government, no-welfare ways to help people out of poverty. He, or someone, has given it a lot of thought, as evidenced by a really, really long online report entitled "Social Capital Project."
Boiled down, the webpage makes the case that people are born poor and stay that way because they lack "social capital." Which basically means that they don't get married and don't go to church. Which is the same as saying that people would thrive without government support if they were just rich, sexy and born into families with connections. It's all true, and utterly useless.
And something that seldom gets said about big business. (Though, to their credit, Lee and some other conservatives are heard to decry the evils of "crony capitalism.")
Trump hadn't even made his historically stupid — and fact-challenged — announcement about pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accords before Utah's two sycophantic senators were praising the decision as a end to what they see as a horrid set of regulations that would handicap American enterprise, drive up the price of energy and, of course, kill jobs.
If the business and industrial leaders of the United States were as weak and helpless as so many Republicans seem to believe, it is unlikely that there would even be such a thing as the United States.
Convert the civilian economy to produce a global war's worth of tanks, airplanes and bombs? Sorry, Mr. Roosevelt, no can do. Rummage through the spare parts of that war to ramp up a whole new age of aviation and space exploration? Gee, Mr. Kennedy, don't you have something easier?
There has always been vicious push-back from those who know, just know, that child labor laws, minimum wages, collective bargaining, workplace safety or environmental protection will cripple and bankrupt business after business, taking all their jobs with them.
It was all false, of course, and those who tried to halt the march of human progress either got with the program or were swept aside.
Now Trump, Hatch and Lee are siding with the 90 pound weaklings of American commerce while the true business leaders — from Elon Musk of Tesla to Secretary of State and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson — favored sticking with the accords.
Real leaders wanted America at the table as the best brains of the world figure out how to keep our economies going at the same time that we learn to cut back — way back — on the greenhouse gases that every literate person who isn't a Republican in the United States knows is altering our climate, kicking up storms, causing floods and droughts and just generally mucking up business prospects for everyone.
One result of the Trump announcement that Lee would deserve to feel good about is the fact that it has moved people who aren't part of the federal government — Jackie Biskupski, Michael Bloomberg, Jerry Brown, Arnold Schwarzenegger — to stand up and pledge to do what they can to fulfill the principles of the Paris accord.
All it really is, after all, is a promise for every nation, every region, every inventor, to go out and think up ways to significantly reduce carbon emissions. It was never a top-down plan.
Real entrepreneurs feel in their bones that someone is going to crack this puzzle and, as a well-earned result, rake in more money than anyone knew existed.
Solar to power an industrial economy? We're on it, Frau Merkel. Bring 17 gigawatts of renewable power online? Well, Monsieur Macron, we may have to use sewage gas. But we'll give it a go.
Will there be subsidies? Probably. It's part of the way that government — acting on behalf of civilization — steers and tweaks the marketplace to produce the stuff we need. The stuff we really need.
Like food and shelter and medical care for people who cannot otherwise afford it.
George Pyle, the Tribune's editorial page editor, has been gainfully employed for all but about two weeks of the last 39 years. He'd still be lost without the taxpayer-provided infrastructure. gpyle@sltrib.com