After America - Mark Steyn [22]
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 Wall Street Journal that in order to put $44,000 in his employee’s pocket and give her an additional $12,000 worth of benefits he has to pay $74,000: Big Government imposes a 30 percent surcharge on the cost of providing employment to Sally.4 It “controls the price” of hiring Sally, and it massively distorts it. Which is one reason the unemployment rate is stuck where it is.
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 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 multi-trillion-dollar enterprise is unknown to human history.
In Justice Marshall’s words:
Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands