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Small businesses are a very good thing for local communities, if only because they engage people in productive work, enable them to feed their families, enrich
by TimTheTinker 4y ago
Small businesses are a very good thing for local communities, if only because they engage people in productive work, enable them to feed their families, enrich local communities with more available goods and services, and promote community building and engagement. All business (in the classical sense, meaning productive work) is a good thing.
Large businesses are the ones that tend to abuse their power, gather data inappropriately, promote monopolies, squash competitors using underhanded tactics, make inappropriate financial deals, lie to investors, and rent-seek at a grand scale -- in other words, all the anti-patterns of badly regulated capitalism.
- astrange 4y agoMonopolies being bad is an axiom of some kinds of political theory that doesn't seem always true. Like I said, they're easier to regulate because there's less of them - that's how utility companies work. And often they're also monopsonies, which means most "monopoly" analysis doesn't work on them. And mom-and-pop businesses are totally capable of bad behavior and especially are worse to their employees! If they're too small to have HR departments they are perfectly capable of doing business based on personal grudges, wage theft, and accidentally doing things up to and including hiring slave labor. > lie to investors This one's funny because startup investors actually demand you lie to them (because they think it shows the right personality traits for a CEO, psychotic optimism), whereas large companies are public and the SEC will sue you if you lie in your investor reports.