Here's a longer version. From today's Financial Times:

There is a sense among companies that this is a difficult place to do business. It is about regulation,taxation,seemingly anti-business policies .... Politicians forget that business has choice. We're not indentured servants and we will do business where it's good and friendly. ..... We've got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada and Mexico - which tend to be pro-business - or America"

- George Buckley 3M Chairman and CEO

Got it?

Do it George's way or he won't play. What NAFTA means to Buckley is that if 3M prefers, say, safety and health regulations in Mexico - or at least the way that they will be enforced (mordida, anyone?) - it's hasta luego.

And Globalization means that Myanmar's getting to look pretty interesting. (Flavius's interjection)

Buckley is not a an outlier. Or a monster. Someone, as the FT puts it whose, "personal story .. is the stuff of a Dickens novel."  Abandoned at 4 months, brought up by a stranger, left a school for the disabled at 15. And now a successful and inspirational leader.

But one who says what all other CEOs also believe but find useful to conceal. That their only objective is to make money for their company and they'll oppose any Government activity unless it actually helps them do that. (Northrop thinks the Air Force is OK).

The interests of 3M or any company are in direct opposition to the interests of the Government. Because they must be. If GE cleans up the diodes which poured into the Hudson over decades it will have to add five dollars to the cost of a dishwasher - and therefore lose some sales to the competitor who assembled its machine in an East Asian country where they'd never think of cleaning diodes from a river. Kind of like having them there.

Liberals relative lack of business experience means that, say, a Bill Clinton didn't intuitively understand that NAFTA was bound to injure this country. It had to lead to a race to the bottom, to a George Buckley saying we'd better become like Mexico or he's going to go to Mexico. 

And what is true internationally is true internally. Artappraiser speculates elsewhere about the conflict between grass roots input and centralized regulations. And as Moat wrote, that's a subject worth exploring. Maybe local parents should be left to decide how to educate their childen. But OSHA and EPA regulations and, yes, protection of collective bargaining must be subject to centralized regulation otherwise the other 49 governors are ultimately going to follow Scott Walker.