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Except…

Why should you be doing that business, instead of a major corporation’s franchise doing it, and their shareholders profiting instead of you?

You are the owner of that business. Naturally, you take the profits you make with your business. But if the big corporation pushes you out of the job and takes your place or buys your small business out, they can put a meagerly paid manager and minimum wage employees there, and just gulp the profits you were ‘hoarding’ for yourself as the business owner.

That way, you won’t ever have a chance to grow your business and threaten the profits of that corporation in other areas, either. So there will be less upstarts disturbing the established order in the market!

If the big corporations can move in to every single area and take over the place of every single small business in all existing sectors, their shareholders will enjoy much more profits.

Sure, there may be various sectors which are yet not efficient for big business to run. Mainly service sectors, things that require crafts/trades. These are difficult to consolidate for big business. But, all the rest easily can be consolidated, and actually already is being consolidated. From what Walmart did to small stores to what healthcare industry is doing to small medical practices.

Therefore, you see, your small business and big business are competitors in a broader sense than what common business logic would propose. You, as a part of the small business collective, are a natural enemy of big corporations. They can work something out in between them when they compete – common shareholder-ships, partnership deals, percentages. But they can’t work something out with millions of small businesses across the country – best way is to take their place and take the profits.

Which, brings a very rational conclusion: Any policy, legislation, regulation which benefits small businesses damage the interests of big business, and any policy, legislation or regulation which benefits big businesses harm small business.

This is true for everything ranging from taxes to regulations:

Like how lower corporate taxes at the top bracket is good for big business, but it reduces the budget that is going to the government which would be spent on infrastructure, society-wide services. Bridges are falling and roads are cracking as a result. The big business can lobby to have what roads and bridges they need repaired for their own transportation network. But the small business, can’t.

Or like how neutrality regulation prevents big ISPs from consolidating the Internet and telling anyone what to do, and charging whatever they want. It damages their potential massive profits. But it also allows anyone to set up an Internet start up with very little investment and start making money, instead of having to hand over a decent percentage of their profits to big ISPs as fees.

Examples are numerous, and cannot be contained in a medium sized article. Therefore we shall stop, and make our conclusion:

Interests of small businesses and big businesses conflict. Small businesses should not back any policy that benefits big corporations, they should not back any politician who is backed by big businesses, they should never fail in backing any policy or politician which fights for small businesses and the public.

Interests of Small Businesses and Big Businesses conflict by Via Populi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.



Originally published at https://ozgurzeren.com/interests-of-small-businesses-and-big-businesses-conflict and republished here under CC license.