Merchants of Doubt chronicles the global warming debate. As Oreskes and Conway document, a small group of scientists (not climate scientists, but physicists) were on the other side of numerous "debates," including second-hand smoke, global warming, acid rain and DDT.  
What Oreskes and Conway discovered is that these scientists weren't initially bought, but rather, were virulent anti-communists who believed that environmental regulation was a form of creeping communism that threatened our liberty. However, rather than debating whether we should have regulation, their strategy was to attack the science.  Although the original group of global warming deniers weren't funded by the fossil fuel industry, polluters certainly had common cause with their efforts and eventually, the think tank they founded (The Marshall Institute) was heavily funded by the the fossil fuel industry.  
Professor Oreskes explained in an interview that she really started to understand the story when she noticed that R.J. Reynolds was donating to the Ludwig Von Mises Cultural Foundation. For those of you who aren't already familiar, Ludwig Von Mises was an Austrian economist. Without going into too much detail, Austrian economic theory supports very limited government. So, they're generally anti-tax and anti-regulation. Also - and I'm sure I'll get some hostile comments - Austrian economics is a crackpot economic theory (a/k/a a heterodox economic theory).  As Paul Krugman once colorfully noted, he considered Austrian economic theory about "as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire." However, the limited-government, laissez faire philosophy of such groups made them very useful to a host of monied interests and therefore, many of these crackpots were very well-funded.
So, industrialists fund various anti-government groups, but for the most part these groups aren't really "pro-business" - they get funded because they have a specifc common cause with business (taxation or regulation), but promoting business interests is not their reason for being. Thus, their reaction to a new event is not necessarily pro-business.
I think this is what happened with the debt ceiling - big business supports certain fringe groups and ideologies and then can't control them. What this means is that the story is money, but in an indirect way - it's about monied interests giving disproportionate influence to crackpot groups because, at some juncture (tobacco regulation, environmental regulation), the ideology of these groups was useful to big business.  However, when a new circumstance arises, the ideology may not be useful to business. But the ideology already has influence - big business can't just shut that influence down.
The anti-government complex - which, at this point, is massive* - is a Frankenstein monster that is generally aligned with business, but not always and not in a predictable way. And it turns out that when an economic crisis occurs, it's not a good thing - even for business - that a bunch of economic crackpots have significant political influence.    
*  The Kochs are libertarians and promote a soft form of Austrian economics (preferring Hayek to Von Mises). There was apparently a split between those who consider themselves purists (represented by the Mises Institute) and the Kochs (who fund various libertarian think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Mercatus Center of George Mason University).
Cross-posted at Daily Kos