David Clark writes:

To abandon the search for a more equitable, productive and democratic economy out of a desire to appear "pro-business" would be a serious error.

This hints at an under-appreciated possibility - that some pro-growth policies are not pro-business. What might these be?

One obvious candidate would be some combination of less austerity, a serious jobs guarantee, a citizens basic income and stronger trades union rights all of which would strengthen workers' bargaining power. These would be "anti-business" in the sense Kalecki noted: they would undermine "the social position of the boss", in part by making employment less dependent upon business confidence.

They might, however, be pro-growth not only in the sense that they increase aggregate demand but because they might encourage productivity growth. If bosses can no longer make profits by employing cheap labour, they would need to increase efficiency and deepen the capital stock. Is it really a coincidence that the strongest sustained rise in productivity we've seen in the UK occurred during the full employment of the 50s and 60s?

This, though, is by no means all. Here are five other possibilities:

- Tougher competition policy, planning reform and less restrictive laws on intellectual property. All these would have the same effect. They'd be anti-business in the sense of weakening the power of incumbent firms, but pro-growth because they would encourage new entrants. Insofar as productivity growth comes from such external restructuring (pdf), they would also raise productivity.

- Encourage alternative sources of finance, such as P2P lending, crowdfunding or even a state investment bank. All these are anti-business in that they are anti-banker but pro-growth because they encourage new companies.

- Tax reform. Lower rates of corporate taxes but with fewer exemptions are against the interests of some businesses but might well be pro-growth. And I suspect that a cut in corporate tax financed by higher top rates of personal tax might highlight the distinction between the interests of business and the interests of those who run them; the two are not the same.

- A maximum wage for quoted companies and organizations in receipt of public funds.As Michael Skapinker says, "even fervent defenders of free markets think top pay is out of control". Such a maximum could unleash a wave of entrepreneurship; it says to managers and bankers: if you want to make big money, you've got to stop being fraudsters and bureaucrats and instead set up your own business.

- Greater worker ownership and control. This would obviously be anti-business, in the sense that it would undermine the power and self-regard of bosses. But we've good (pdf) evidence that it might well increase productivity (pdf) - perhaps for the Hayekian reason that it makes better use of fragmentary, dispersed knowledge than bosses can. We know that centrally planned economies are a bad idea - so why assume that centrally planned companies are?

My point here is a simple one which, like pretty much any economically literate idea, is utterly disregarded by our idiot media - that there's a big difference between being pro-business and pro-markets. Remember that it was business (or a chunk thereof) that caused the financial crisis by mismanaging the banks and by failing to invest in real capital, thus encouraging money to flow into malinvestments such as dodgy mortgage derivatives. Should we really wholly entrust it with the recovery without even thinking about the alternatives?