What They Believe

Another ignorant, self-serving, no-nothing business executive gives an interview blaming slow growth on the federal government. In this case it’s Bernie Marcus, founder of Home Depot.

Managers don’t make business decisions based on Truth but based on what they believe to be true.

As best as I’ve been able to determine it looks to me as though Mr. Marcus is a pretty staunch Republican so it’s possible that his views could be politically motivated. I think it’s more the other way around: he’s a Republican because he holds the views that he does.

Update

He’s not alone:

• 3M’s George Buckley, who blasted Obama last February as anti-business. “We know what his instincts are,” Buckley said. “We’ve got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada or Mexico — which tends to be more pro-business — and America,” he told the Financial Times.

• Boeing’s Jim McNerney, who in the Wall Street Journal last May called Obama’s handpicked National Labor Relations Board’s suit against his company a “fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago.”

• Intel’s Paul Otellini, who told CNET last August that the U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe — this is the bitter truth.”

• Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who observed to radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that Obama “never had to make payroll,” that “nobody has ever created a job in this administration” and that the president is “surrounded by college professors.”

• GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, one of Obama’s biggest supporters, who hit out at the president last year. “Business did not like the U.S. president and the president did not like business,” the FT reported him saying. “People are in a really bad mood. We have to become an industrial powerhouse again, but you don’t do this when government and entrepreneurs are not in sync.”

• Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, another Obama backer, who blasted Obama’s bank tax in January 2010 as a “guilt tax,” once called Obama’s carbon tax idea “regressive” and this month denounced Obama’s obsession with corporate jets.

The point here is not the objective truth of their views. The point is that these are their views and unless those views are changed somehow it will take a lot longer for the economy to recover than it otherwise would.