The Big Dogs & Big Bailouts

I don't hate big corporations. When people talk about how terrible Wal-Mart is, I roll my eyes. It doesn't get my ire up when I hear about the scandalous pay that some CEO's get. But I get really animated when I think that businesses are getting special treatment, and when the market is being circumvented in favor of cronyism.

I am a free market champion, not a big business champion. When the market crashes, and big banks go under, I cheer the speed and effectiveness by which property is reallocated and investments are realigned. I do not, as some conservatives are prone to do, support preferential treatment, subsidies, and tax breaks for the same reasons that I oppose excessive regulation and burdensome corporate taxes.

With all that in mind, I submit to you that many of the complaints of the left against large corporations should really be directed at the Federal Government. When the government is doling out special favors, like freshly printed money (i.e. low-interest government loans), it goes to the big guys first. It's the big guys that profit the most from those loans. It's the big guys that get the bailouts, the subsidies, the preferential treatment, that helps them make it through the correction. And it's the big guys that are given first dibs when it comes to buying up the bankruptcies.

It is not the free market that is creating these obscenely bloated multi-billion dollar corporations, it is the privileges that they receive from our government that allows them to grow to the size that they do.

If we allowed the free market to work, we would see smaller privately-held debt-free banks picking up market share. Since we have a corporate-government cabal, we are seeing multiple corporate entities merging into corporo-government monstrosities. I can guarantee you that the free market would not have fostered these transactions. The free market would have parsed these entities out to their creditors, and their creditors would have sold them to hundreds of local and regional interests who would have been willing to pay much more to gain market share in their region.