Business is slightly more comlicated than that, but perhaps Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of obama's favorite corporation, GE, and the chairman of his jobs commission could explain it to you. He just moved GE's MRI division, which everyone would concede is the kind of high tech, knowledge-intensive business we need, from the US to China. If an obama-suckup has that little confidence in him, why should the rest of us trust him?
I am not sure how you arrived at that conclusion since its always been apparent that all the UK political elites have always resented individualism and free market philosophies its not an exclusive domain of the left. As for Thatcher making the UK more competitive thats only true of the financial sector where deregulation actually had a positive effect, elsewhere deregulation and the weakening of the unions had no effect on industrial competitiveness whatsoever. If anything Thatcher will be best remembered for the expansion of the welfare state and fiscal ineptitude. People in glass houses with AA+ credit ratings should not throw stones.
Naive. It isn't all about sales. Say you have a company that makes widgets. And there's new equipment that will help you make these widgets cheaper, but the capital outlay required will mean that it will take 7 years for the investment to break even, given zero sales growth. But a further analysis says that if taxes increase 8% due to politics/guv spending, then it will never repay itself. Why would any smart business ever invest at becoming more efficent (and hopefully more environmentally clean) given the condition that taxes may increase? They will wait until things have settled, and they know that their taxes are gonna increase only 2%, and therefore the investmant will now pay off in 10 years. IOW, until they KNOW..... they will sit on their hands doing nothing, which means that the company that makes these more efficent machines miss a sale, the construction compant that would be constructing the new building and installing the new eq will miss out on a job, the local guv will miss out on charging for inspection fees etc, and the local geotechnical service contractor will miss out on doing an EIR. All cuz of uncertainty. End sales of widgets have zero effect on whether or not THIS type of project gets off the ground.......
The British are a bunch of violent idiots who are frustrated that their country is a has-been. Thats why they went on riots.
Britain is just great! That is if you are happen to be a criminal. You don't don't need to worry about any of the law abiding folks, they are not armed and they are certainly not allowed to defend themselves with anything more than rehtoric (better make sure it's PC rehtoric though!).