21A044 Too Big to... Survive by Jim Davies, 11/16/2021

Very large corporations are thought to be impregnable and dangerous, threats to human happiness; so those who fear them want governments to limit them, to break up their monopolies and cartels.

There's very little truth in that, and in the coming zero government society there will be none at all. Currently megacorporations like large banks are said - by the very governments that the Left wants to limit them - to be "too big to fail" and are handed truck loads of fabricated "money" to keep them afloat when times are hard. But in the ZGS, they will be too big to survive.

It works this way. A bright pioneer comes up with a new idea; an invention like the telephone, or a clever way to retail existing products, like books. He or she or a group of them get to work and succeed and grow, plowing back their profits into further expansion and/or selling shares to investors. That's capitalism. When government has evaporated, it's how all commercial progress will work, for it's natural to a free market. If the idea is good and the venture well managed, customers will choose to buy and growth will continue - until the company is massive. Then, its sheer size makes it vulnerable to nimble new rivals - and to cumbersome bureaucracy.

Currently, big firms use their wealth to buy political influence; they pour money into re-election campaigns of Rs and Ds alike, frequently both. In return, they expect and get protection from those nimbler rivals, in the form of laws and taxes, which they are big enough to suffer (or rather, to pass on to customers as higher prices) but the small competitor is not.

That's exactly what the "Progressive" movement, circa 1900, did - as this Edition of the ZGBlog detailed. "Anti Trust" Acts of Congress purported to cut cartels' power but actually did the opposite. Today, one of the several purposes of the Covid Fraud is to drive us buyers away from bricks & mortar stores, into the hands of on-line giant retailers like Amazon; no wonder Bezos is so friendly to government people and dines with them in Davos. No wonder "Big Pharma" is reaping rich rewards from it by producing experimental "vaccines" under the umbrella of zero liability when they kill.

But when such umbrellas are removed, big firms will have to shift for themselves.

In addition, all big firms always suffer from bureaucratic inflexibility. A sole proprietor can and does make key business decisions instantly; he chooses, and its done - the same day. A multi-division conglomerate must pass the proposal through several levels of committee reviews. The contrast is huge, like an ocean liner and an outboard-equipped inflatable. While those committees consider, nimble rivals eat in to their market share. By 1970, IBM was dominant in its field, but distributed computers were being offered by firms like Digitial Equipment, and by decade's end Apple had burst on the scene with its personal computer. Big Blue was blindsided.

Such ponderous inflexibility is proportional to size (or is it to the square of size?) whether the organization is a profit-seeking market participant or government itself. The big difference is that the latter has no competition, by law; therefore it never goes belly-up. "Creative destruction" can never apply. That's why it is always so profoundly bureaucratic, bloated and inefficient.

It will vanish, though, on that happy day when nobody is left who will work for it - and then, the size of even the best players will be limited by eager rivals and the absence of any Big Nanny to protect them; hence, none will dominate and human progress will be optimized. I can hardly wait!