undermining the property market, the government went on to seek a monopoly in college loans, plus control of the automobile industry and health care.
In his dissenting opinion on
We have here the problem of bigness….
Now who does that sound like? No, not Kodak. The fact that George Harrison’s selection of an all-powerful monopoly rings so sweetly nostalgic just a few decades later is testament to the self-correcting mechanisms of a functioning market. Kodak, which actually invented some of the first digital camera technology in 1975, failed to foresee how fast things were changing, and eventually wound up laying off 60 percent of its workforce.3 Had the statists been in charge of that sector as they now are of so many others, we’d still be snapping with Kodak Instamatics, and it would take you two weeks to get your holiday pics and cost you $800, because the government had intervened to protect the jobs of Instastatistmatic film developers in the unionized Kodacrony lab.
These days, the Number One example of the Curse of Bigness is government. It doesn’t just create “gross inequalities” against existing or putative competitors, it passes laws and drives them out, as it’s done to everything from genuinely private health-care arrangements to non-state-licensed kids’ lemonade stands. In Justice Marshall’s words, it’s a “social menace” because of its “control of prices.”
How does it control them? Michael Fleischer, the owner of a small company in New Jersey, explained to readers of the
How else does it control prices? In 2009, something called the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia decided that studios offering yoga teacher instruction had to be “certified.”5 So what else is new? Everything’s certified these days. Why not yoga? It’s just a $2,500 certification fee, plus undreaming america annual charges of at least $500, plus state audits, plus a ton of paperwork.
But don’t worry, with a bit of practice, you can multitask and fill in all the forms in the lotus position. In the Fifties, one in twenty members of the workforce needed government permission in order to do his job.6 Today, it’s one in three. So Big Government “controls the price” of your yoga lesson.
Look on it as a twofer: all the purifying benefits of yoga, now with the dead weights of Big Government.
Government today has a monopoly of monopoly. If you were to update the board game of the same name to reflect reality, every square you land on would require you to pay a fee to government before you can do anything —occupational license, commercial-use permit, processing fee for a license to permit you to collect sales tax. You’d go straight to jail without passing “Go” for putting up a yoga studio on Atlantic Avenue and being delinquent in your meditation-accreditation application, but the government would let you plea-bargain it down to a $3,000 fine. If you land on “Go,” you’d have to pass a “Go” impact-study inspection before being allowed to go.
There’s your Curse of Bigness, and the only one beyond the jurisdiction of the Antitrust Division.
Alas, the monopolizers don’t see it as a curse. Before he became Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner (by his own admission) failed to pay the United States Treasury the taxes he owed because he couldn’t follow the yes/no prompts of elementary TurboTax software. Undaunted, by early 2009, he and President Obama, two men with no business management experience whatsoever, who have never created a nickel of wealth between them, were “managing” more money than any individuals anywhere on the planet have ever done. Fans of Big Government take it for granted that Obama, Geithner, and a handful of other guys can “run” the financial sector, and the auto industry, and the insurance industry, and the property market, and health care, and even the very climate of the planet. The Barackracy assume that a few clever people in Washington can direct trillions of dollars more productively than the companies and individuals from whom they confiscated it. There are many people who can run businesses worth a million dollars. The ability to run a billion-dollar corporation is the province of very few individuals. The skill-set required to run a multitrillion-dollar enterprise is unknown to human history.
In Justice Marshall’s words:
Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on the whim or caprice, the political prejudices, the emotional stability of a few self- appointed men. The fact that they are not vicious men but respectable and social minded is irrelevant.
In 1948 Marshall was worried about steel. But the dominant industrial power of our time is government. And it is because of the government monopoly that “the fortunes of the people” are dependent on “the whim or caprice” (not to mention “the emotional stability”) of a small number of all too like-minded individuals.
You can see where power lies in the very landscape: go to a steel town six decades after Marshall’s warning. The burg’s shot to hell. The handsome Victorian homes on the tree-lined avenues are worn and crumbling, with cracked clapboards and sagging porches, and cheaply partitioned into low-rent apartments. The railroad halts that sent the products of American industry across the nation and around the world are dead, their depots converted into laundromats and pizza joints or, worse, “community centers,” with the track removed and its weed-strewn path redesignated as a “heritage trail.” Where do wealth and power gravitate today? In 2009
Washington, D.C., has become the favorite area for wealthy young adults, with the nation’s highest percentage of 25-34 year-olds making more than $100,000 a year.7
You don’t say! Now I wonder why that would be. Of the fifty counties with the biggest percentage of young high earners, sixteen were in the D.C. area.
Of the top ten, only two were not near either Washington or a state capital.8
Reuters filed this revealing analysis in its “lifestyle” section. Which makes sense. The easiest way to a “lifestyle” is a government job. The following year, another survey (from
What matters in the America of the twenty-first century is proximity not to industry or to wealth creation but to government.
As George Harrison warned, “the government’s monopolizing”: it has a monopoly of law, of licensing, of regulation, and when it abuses that monopoly then eventually you can’t move without encountering government at every turn. Even before the Obama spendaholics got to work supersizing the state, all levels of government, federal to local, were already sucking up over 40 cents of every dollar American workers generate.10 (European nations were able to go beyond even that dismal figure only because the United States has relieved them of the responsibility for their own defense.) The assumed rationale for an ever more intrusive superstate is that, thanks to technology and globalization, the world is far more complex and interconnected than in the days when hardscrabble farmers in New England townships could be trusted to run their own affairs. There is little objective evidence to support this argument, but it conveniently bolsters the political class’s belief in its own indispensability. Willie Whitelaw, the genial old buffer who served as Margaret Thatcher’s deputy for many years, once accused the Labour Party of going around Britain stirring up apathy. Viscount Whitelaw’s apparent paradox is, in fact, a shrewd political insight, and all the sharper for being accidental. Big Government depends on going around the country stirring up apathy—creating the sense that problems are so big, so complex, so intractable that even attempting to think about them for yourself gives you such a splitting headache it’s easier to shrug and accept as given the proposition that only government can deal with them.
Take health care. Through all the interminable health-care “debates” of Obama’s first year, did you read any of the proposed plans? Of course not.
