Politics & Power Quote by Dick Cheney

The genius of this line is how it smuggles ideology in under the cloak of national improvement. "Make America the best place in the world" sounds like a generic civic aspiration, but the sentence quietly narrows the definition of "best" to a single constituency: capital. It is patriotism translated into a balance sheet, with "America" functioning less as a community than as a platform product competing for investment.

Cheney’s phrasing is corporate and managerial, not inspirational. "Have to" signals inevitability, as if policy choices are simply the demands of physics. "To do business" is the key euphemism: it compresses deregulation, tax policy, labor rules, environmental enforcement, and corporate liability into a warm, frictionless noun. The human consequences - wages, safety, public goods - become externalities, pushed offstage by the rhetorical focus on competitiveness.

Context does the rest. Cheney’s political brand was forged in the late-20th-century consensus that government should be judged by how efficiently it serves markets, and sharpened by his proximity to energy and defense industries that thrive on favorable regulation and federal contracting. Coming from a vice president, the line also carries the weight of state power: "making it easy to do business" often means the government actively reshaping rules, enforcement priorities, and even foreign policy to secure commercial advantage.

The subtext isn’t just pro-business. It’s an argument about who the country is for, delivered as if that question has already been settled.