"Americans want small business, small government," my colleague Conn Carroll writes today, citing a Gallup Poll on the national mood. Gallup's numbers show 69 percent of Americans upset with the size and influence on major corporations, and 63 percent upset with the size and influence of government.
Gallup writes:
These results suggest that it's a case of "pick your poison" in the political arena when it comes to big business and big government....
I think this is wrong, because it suggests that as government grows, big business shrinks, vice-versa. This isn't true, and the poll numbers suggest that many Americans don't buy into this notion either. I don't have the crosstabs, but simple subtraction suggests that at least 20 percent of the country thinks big business and big government both have too much influence.
I think that the best way -- maybe the only way -- to curb the influence of big business is to curb the influence of big government. These guys couldn't get bailouts if the government didn't have the power to bail people out. They couldn't rig the tax code so profitably if taxes were lower and simpler. They wouldn't set up their lobbying encampments to rig the system in Washington if Washington weren't playing such a big role in the economy in the first place.
The net effect of government's largeness is, in my view, protection of the biggest guys and oppression of small business, consumers, and taxpayers. I've written a ton on how this is true. Eminent domain frequently benefits big business. Companies like Wal-Mart and Boeing get a disproportionate amount of government incentives. And regulation increases industry consolidation, too. Here's the little list I made for a related blog post earlier this week:
Off the top of my head I can think of a few overregulations that unfairly favor the wealthy: crackdowns on food trucks in favor of restaurants, regulations blocking people from selling home-baked goods, online gaming regulation favoring big casinos, regulations keeping women from doing hair-braiding for money, and a bunch more
So, Gallup is wrong. It's not "pick your poison." It's two poisons in one.
