The slattern-like willingness of Big Business to get in bed with government has been a particular bugaboo of mine of late. From my cover story in April:

Then there’s big business. The story corporate America tells itself is that it’s the living embodiment of the American Dream. They’re for free markets and competition and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism. They stand opposed, on high principle if nothing else, to government intrusions into the marketplace. If they get involved in the filthy business of lobbying government, it’s to protect themselves from the Fabian succubi of the Leviathan state, which is always desperate to drain the lifeblood of entrepreneurialism from the American Way. “As the voice of business,” explains the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s website, “the Chamber’s core purpose is to fight for free enterprise before Congress, the White House, regulatory agencies, the courts, the court of public opinion, and governments around the world.” Their mission statement is even more high-minded: “To advance human progress through an economic, political and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.” The problem with both stories is that they are exactly that — stories, self-esteem boosters that businessmen and liberals repeat not so much so they can respect each other, but so they can respect themselves in the morning. It defies all the data. As National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson recently noted (“Losing Gordon Gekko,” March 9), in the last two election cycles, big Wall Street firms gave more to Democrats than to Republicans. Democrats also led in most other big-business sectors. One explanation of this is that businessmen are opportunistic and their money follows political power. While largely true, this is hardly evidence that big business is steadfast in its free-market principles.
This tendency goes far beyond campaign contributions. Leaf through various editions of Patterns of Corporate Philanthropy and you’ll find that corporations have always given overwhelmingly to left-leaning non-profits that agitate for anti-business policies. “There are few phenomena so remarkable today,” William Simon wrote in one such report in 1988, “as the seemingly relentless determination of America’s largest business corporations to set aside a portion of their earnings for the benefit of their enemies.”
In his book The Suicidal Corporation, journalist Paul Weaver famously recounts how he left his job at Fortune to work for Ford’s public-affairs department. Excited to champion a great American company and “defend American capitalism,” Weaver was dismayed to discover a level of dysfunction that makes the cast of Dilbert seem like the Green Berets. Eager to rebut a largely bogus safety campaign against the Ford Pinto, Weaver suggested contacting a friend at the Wall Street Journal to see if they might run an editorial defending the company. To the pros at Ford, this was crazy talk. Better to just roll over for the lawsuits, issue a mealy-mouthed denial of wrongdoing, and hope that the whole controversy would go away. Alas, it wouldn’t. Finally, the public-affairs chief held a contest for the best idea on how to deal with the controversy. The winning idea? Let’s sponsor the PBS show Washington Week in Review! Why? Because everyone knows that funding smarmy PBS shows silences the Left. Just ask Bill Moyers.

And from a recent column:

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition. On health care, insurance companies and others repeat the mantra that they want to be “at the table rather than on the menu,” all the better to be positioned as a tax collector of the welfare state. General Motors and Chrysler have gone from being pimped-out prostitutes of the state to outright chattel more akin to the leather-bound gimp in Pulp Fiction, eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.
Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want. Indeed, cap-and-trade taxes promise to deliver precisely the protectionist industrial policies the Left has dreamed of for decades, only under a “progressive” label.
This week, Philip Morris, the biggest of the big tobacco companies, supported and won passage of an “anti-tobacco” bill that will make it easier for Philip Morris (a subsidiary of Altria) to sell cigarettes by making it harder for smaller, more innovative firms to compete. One way it will do that is by curtailing the First Amendment rights of tobacco companies, making it harder to advertise their products (including healthier alternatives to normal cigarettes). Philip Morris, maker of Marlboro and other established brands, already controls 50 percent of the market. That’s why it lobbied government to keep it that way.

The Wal-Mart news is disappointing but far from shocking. I discuss Wal-Mart’s move toward government protection in my book. Wal-Mart used to boast that it didn’t care about Washington. But Washington insisted it should care about Wal-Mart. So once Uncle Sam decided to meddle with Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart decided to meddle back.