Sneering at "free stuff" is a vicious Repuke attack on the very idea of public goods.

[KansDem]

25. Free stuff for corporations

More Free Stuff for Corporations

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This rich guy, Peter Georgescu, chairman emeritus of the PR firm Young & Rubicam, said in a New York Times op-ed in August that he feared the current grotesque level of income inequality would provoke major social unrest or oppressive tax levies on the rich – unless the rich did something about it right away. To avert restoration of the higher income tax levels that the rich paid from 1935 to 1985, Georgescu recommended that the federal government give money to businesses to raise the wages of workers earning less than $80,000 a year.

That’s right. He says the government should subsidize corporations. The government should give them free stuff. Welfare. The government, in his estimation, should pay corporations rather than simply requiring them to use some of their massive profits, now at the highest level in 85 years, to adequately compensate the workers whose labor created those profits.

Making the government pay is a popular position among Georgescu’s wealthy peers and GOP politicians. They don’t want the government to protect the environment or negotiate for lower pharmaceutical prices for senior citizens on Medicare or provide 16 million Americans with insurance through the Affordable Care Act. They do want the government to hand money to corporations, though.

Just weeks ago, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, announced he’d use this corporate freebie scheme to provide paid sick and maternity leave. The United States is the only major industrial country in the world without a federal policy requiring paid sick and maternity leave. Rubio called the absence of paid leave “one of the greatest threats to family today.”

Even so, he wouldn’t actually require corporations to provide it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/more-free-stuff-for-corpo_b_8240520.html