"We need comprehensive reform that will make America the best place in the world to invest and do business"
About this Quote
“Comprehensive reform” is the kind of phrase that sounds like bold leadership while carefully refusing to name its beneficiaries. Coming from Jim DeMint, a movement-aligned Republican best known for anti-tax absolutism and a free-market brand of populism, the line is less policy detail than ideological staging: America is framed not as a polity with competing needs, but as a platform competing in a global marketplace.
The intent is clear: set the terms of debate so that “reform” defaults to pro-business changes - lower corporate taxes, fewer regulations, weaker labor constraints - without having to argue each one on the merits. “Make America the best place in the world to invest and do business” borrows the language of rankings and competitiveness, a rhetorical move that turns political choices into scorekeeping. If the country is a business climate, then citizens become inputs: workers as costs, consumers as demand, communities as “externalities” to be managed.
The subtext is a subtle moral sorting. Investment and business are treated as the primary engines of national wellbeing; anything that slows them is implicitly selfish or naive. It also smuggles in a threat: if we don’t accommodate capital, capital will leave. That’s the quiet leverage in globalization talk - an argument that narrows democratic options by presenting them as economically irresponsible.
Context matters: DeMint’s era was defined by post-9/11 politics, the 2008 crisis aftermath, and fierce fights over regulation and health care. The line sells a simple north star to an anxious electorate: growth first, and the rest will follow. Whether it does is the part left conveniently offstage.
The intent is clear: set the terms of debate so that “reform” defaults to pro-business changes - lower corporate taxes, fewer regulations, weaker labor constraints - without having to argue each one on the merits. “Make America the best place in the world to invest and do business” borrows the language of rankings and competitiveness, a rhetorical move that turns political choices into scorekeeping. If the country is a business climate, then citizens become inputs: workers as costs, consumers as demand, communities as “externalities” to be managed.
The subtext is a subtle moral sorting. Investment and business are treated as the primary engines of national wellbeing; anything that slows them is implicitly selfish or naive. It also smuggles in a threat: if we don’t accommodate capital, capital will leave. That’s the quiet leverage in globalization talk - an argument that narrows democratic options by presenting them as economically irresponsible.
Context matters: DeMint’s era was defined by post-9/11 politics, the 2008 crisis aftermath, and fierce fights over regulation and health care. The line sells a simple north star to an anxious electorate: growth first, and the rest will follow. Whether it does is the part left conveniently offstage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Investment |
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