Liberals often have a misguided, yet sincere, belief that the enemy and barrier between where we are now and where we need to be is Big Business. A common rallying cry on the left is that Big [Fill in the Blank] is being unfair and must be punished.

Now, of course, there have been and continue to be businesses that operate in a less than ethical manner and/or crush their competition ruthlessly. But we're entering an era of governmental involvement in business hitherto unseen in this country, and one thing that should be noticed is that many of the biggest businesses are all for it.

There's a law of unintended consequences that always gets passed when Congress begins to take on "Big Business", and it is this: the biggest businesses can generally afford whatever onerous burdens Congress decide to lay on them, and often they encourage Congressional action as a way of eliminating their smaller competition.

For instance, I work for a medium-sized Natural Gas exploration company. We find the stuff in the ground that you use to heat your house, cook your food, etc. The Obama administration and the congress have not yet set their sights on "Big Energy", but, trust me, that's coming. When they do, it won't be companies like Shell and Exxon-Mobile that go down. It will be smaller companies like the one I work for, and in the end the big boys will be the only ones standing, stronger than ever. They are, you see, "too big to fail".


Jonah Goldberg has a column on this that is well worth reading. Some excerpts:

Everywhere we look we see the great and once-great beneficiaries of free markets running to the state for protection from the cruel bullying of competition. On health care, insurance companies and others repeat the mantra that they want to be “at the table rather than on the menu,” all the better to be positioned as a tax collector of the welfare state. General Motors and Chrysler have gone from being pimped-out prostitutes of the state to outright chattel more akin to the leather-bound gimp in Pulp Fiction, eager to do the bidding of the president and the UAW.

Once-proud companies like GE have become seduced by global-warming schemes because they recognize that there’s more money to be made selling white elephants to Uncle Sam than there is selling competitive products consumers want. Indeed, cap-and-trade taxes promise to deliver precisely the protectionist industrial policies the Left has dreamed of for decades, only under a “progressive” label.

. . .

Also this week, the White House announced its plan to deal with “systemic risk” in the financial markets. The basic idea is that big firms — giant banks, insurance companies, etc. — cannot be allowed to fail if their failure threatens something called “stability.” The Obama administration is confident that with its new organizational flow charts and enhanced job description for the Federal Reserve, bureaucrats will suddenly see clearly what they couldn’t see before. These regulators will know exactly when bubbles get too big, when booms last too long, and when tens of thousands of managers, investors, actuaries, and bankers make bad or sub-optimal decisions.

The problem, other than the shortage of Jedis and shamans to fill these posts, is that big companies will understand the surest way to attain immortality is to become too big to fail. Once they’ve achieved that privileged status, these companies will become de facto wards of the state, insured for life at taxpayer expense like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and in exchange they will do whatever Uncle Sam asks.