Think, for a moment, about what corporations are. They exist to make a return for shareholders and are generally managed from the top down. Every few months, a CEO has to ask themselves: "Are my investors richer than they were four quarters ago?" If the answer is yes, chances are they've done their job. If the answer is no, it's their obligation to cut costs and boost revenue. Once the boss comes up with a strategy for making it happen, it's everybody else's task to implement it.

Upshot: They're dictatorships that turn a profit.

This is not how most people envision the United States, thankfully, and especially not conservatives. We're a messy democracy that leaves much in our economy up to chance (or, if you prefer, the market). There's no official growth target for the economy. The Federal Reserve can set all the employment benchmarks it wants, and nobody else is required to play along. Congress can tell the president to take his jobs plan and shove it. Corporations can take tax cuts designed to spur hiring and spend them on fat dividend checks for shareholders instead.

Tim Cook, by contrast, doesn't have to worry about Apple's R&D department using its design budget on catering.

There are countries out there that do run themselves more like businesses. We just don't emulate them. They have heavy-handed industrial policies geared at cultivating individual sectors of the economy while keeping employment and trade surpluses high. China sets explicit targets on everything from GDP to education to the number of movie screens around the country, then helps make it happen by directing banks to hand out low interest loans to state-owned enterprises. Once upon a time, Japan's powerful government bureaucrats helped transform their country into the world's most fearsome exporter. We started calling their corporate giants "Japan, Inc."

This all may sound vaguely familiar to you. With his clean energy programs and proposals to subsidize manufacturing, President Obama has pursued a diet version of these industrial policies. But even those relatively modest stabs at industrial policy have gotten push-back, most of all from Republicans. The majority Americans, for better or worse, don't really seem to want the Untied States to run like a business. Nor, I imagine, does David Siegel.