Let’s face it, in a supposed free enterprise economy, to have a business that is extremely large and influential enough, as well as also encompassing important and vital interests of the state, is thereby the type of business that can pretty much write its own ticket, because that which is considered to be too big to fail, or too vital to ever lose, means that this business enterprise can therefore take on outsized risks and thus become a potential moral hazard to this nation because it is ultimately backed by the very government, itself, at the expense of the people, thereby effectively hurting other companies’ prospects that are not thus afforded the same type of protection or favoritism.
Look, the thing about capitalism, is that there shouldn’t be any guarantees that a particular business cannot ever go out of business, but rather businesses should fairly compete against one another, in which, in essence, the strong and robust survive, and those that are less efficient, less innovative, or poorly managed, suffer their just deserts for their failure to successfully compete at the level that they need to be at. So too, it is a significant mistake for this governance to believe that somehow bigger is always better, when it could be stated, that there is much more safety in having many smaller enterprises that can get those necessary things successfully done, then to have all of our collective eggs in just one basket.
Indeed, the bigger that an enterprise is, the greater will be its fall should that fall so come, and thus upon that fall the negative implication for the economy, in whole; whereas, where there are many smaller enterprises, their individual failure, may indeed have implications, but such is much more localized and will not then have the same sort of negative impact as a business that has its talons in just about everything. Additionally, all those companies that believe that they are an irreplaceable cog in the machine of this nation, are the very same companies that will be able to garner the type of special privileges that other enterprises are not privy to or afforded to have.
That which is too big to fail, have an inherent advantage over every other single enterprise that is not backstopped by this government, which therefore means that all the inefficiencies, errors, bad decisions, and inept management that too big to fail companies exhibit, are ultimate borne by the people that make up this nation. So too, when innovative companies that could compete with these behemoths on some level, or take away some portion of the business that too big to fail companies have, but are precluded from doing so, because this government permits them to merge into, or be bought from those very same too big to fail companies then the very problem that currently exists, only worsens.
If indeed the business of America is business, then what America needs to actually accomplish, first and foremost, is to understand that businesses that are too big to fail, are bad business, and further that these too big to fail businesses are inimical to our free enterprise system, through and through.