John Brummett: Pro-Business vs. Pro-Market

In an earlier column, John Brummett quotes Rep. Marion Berry on the Medicare prescription drug plan:

He said the Bush administration program is not based on private sector market competition. It's based instead, he said, on the very antithesis of that - on protecting the existing pharmaceutical and insurance industries from real market pressures brought about by changes in demand....

It's not unlike the way electric utilities wanted to write deregulation laws to perpetuate themselves....

Brummett sums it up well:

What voters need to begin to ponder is whether there is a difference between pro-business and pro-market, and whether modern Republicans have become so much the former that they don't qualify as the latter.