Big Government and Big Business

It is a common feature of the politically progressive mentality to agonize over the size of business, to consider big businesses as somehow a threat to our lifestyle and perhaps even our liberty. It is an equally common feature of the politically conservative mentality to have the same kinds of reservations about the size of government. Oddly, few seem to be worried about both. Those who worry about big government seem fine with big business, while those who worry about big business don’t tend to complain about the size of government.  

This is puzzling, because it does not take much logical gymnastics to figure out that big government without a healthy sized private sector would verge on a command economy, or economy proactively invented and dictated by government, a policy with a disastrous track record in the world.  Conversely, big business without an aptly sized public sector to balance it would result effectively in government being overpowered by large corporations. To allow business to be big while shrinking government is dangerous to democracy, since our elective officials can only govern to the extent that they have the power to do so; but if  government is overpowered by corporations, then the ones effectively governing are the czars of big business.  

Both of these unhealthy, unbalanced states of affairs have been instantiated in the world over and over, and their results are plainly visible. We see what attempts at command economy did to China during the cultural revolution, causing mass starvation; how it has caused the economies of North Korea and Venezuela to fail. On the other hand, in this country we see in certain cases how private sector interests have infiltrated and bought out government to the point of paralyzing our ability to respond to things like gun violence and the opioid crisis as well as a wider inability to stem the tide of Big Pharma’s takeover of the health care profession. Why, then, do we insist on opening only one eye at a time, seeking to put one excess in check while allowing the other to run rampant? That some of us are grabbing one end of the stick while others grab the other does not lessen the problem, since it divides us and only leads to stalemate, which is just as good as victory to those lording it over us in either sector. We all need to be grabbing both ends of the stick at the same time. (See attached for full paper.)