Here's Larry Kudlow:

The key thing to remember is that businesses drive the economy. Businesses create jobs and incomes for consumers to spend. Today’s John Edwards/Mike Huckabee anti-business populism sounds more like William Jennings Bryan than Adam Smith. It’s absolutely crazy. They attack Wall Street and investors, which is another way of attacking capital. Without capital investment, there will be no new business, no new jobs, and no middle class.

... America is an optimistic country, and for the life of me I don’t know why the Republican presidential candidates can’t understand this.

I am no fan of the populists' spiel. But I recall this essay, from last year:

The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.

... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Amid all the fervor for Going Green this election year, what ever happened to Reduce?

Really, the best thing that we can do for the planet is to use less of it.

So, whose platform is that? The chatter about "energy independence" is code for farm subsidies. It's about domestic growth, perhaps to the detriment of foreign profit, but it's not as though OPEC would pump significantly less oil -- they just wouldn't earn quite so much for it. The developing world will pick up all the slack. Recall, from earlier this week:

China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates.

'Goldilocks needs tax reform ... not root-canal economic populism'