I have a different perspective.
As far as I can see, US companies are currently doing very well. In almost every economic sector, list the largest, fastest-growing, most profitable companies, and you'll see that the great majority of them are US companies. I'm thinking of technology, finance, retailing, industrial, pharma, etc. Steel (where Lube's buddy works) is an obvious exception, but it is a minor economic sector.
At the level of small and medium-sized businesses, I think the US is much more dynamic than most other countries. I don't have numbers to prove this, but I believe far more entrepreneurs start more businesses here than in Europe or Japan.
Here's a quick and dirty way to check this.
Simply add up the capitalization of every region's stock market, converted into US dollars. The US markets are 47% of the global total, (Europe is 27%, Japan is 9%, Asia ex-Japan is 9%, and the rest of the world is 8%.)
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prSG00135805
The percentage of global stock market capitalization represented by the US is much higher than the US's share of global GDP - about 20%
http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/GDP_PPP.pdf - or of total population.
So collectively the world's investors are giving US companies a higher valuation relative to US economic output and to the US labor pool, which suggests that in aggregate US companies are extracting more output from their employees, more profit from their business, are better users of capital, and have higher growth - than companies in other regions.
This doesn't seem to me like US business being "killed".
My view, therefore, is that most of the things that the steel mill VP lists, or that Ronin listed, have not in fact been major impediments to US business. Some sound like general griping (damn politicians and wimmin - they should all let us real men get on with bizness), some sound like right-wing manifesto (damn judiciary - the judicial system in the US is more favorable to business than almost anywhere, just try to get a patent enforced in China or a dispute resolved in Japan). The others sound like problems that are becoming serious but so far haven't prevented US business from winning (health care, education).
(By the way, I know the above analysis is a bit indirect, and that we could simply look up the P/Es of the world's stock markets, or the aggregate profit margins and growth rates of each country's companies - but I'm at home and don't have access to the info.)