Anonymous

You are not considering all the factors. No one impeded on the mom and pop’s freedom (assuming no regulation or government interference). The efficiencies driven by scale make goods cheaper and make the mom and pop owners wealthier because other industries are doing the same and they are buying other things cheaper that they don’t provide at their own store. You have to take into consideration the total economic benefit to everyone. Mom and pop going out of business is a normal result of freedom, competition and the right to contract/invest. In a truly free system, they will find other decent jobs. Sure, some will fall through the cracks and look as if they were treated unfairly, but believe it or not this will happen to fewer people in a truly free system that benefits consumers than in a heavily regulated system like we have now (just look at unemployment and welfare recipients). Big government trying to do the right thing just makes it worse. You also have to look back through history. Our country was once 95%+ agrarian (farmer). Then the industrial revolution came (tractors). A very small % of people now produce food for even more people and we don’t need so many farmers. Guess what, they all lost their jobs. And they all successfully transferred to industrial jobs. Then other people in the world decided they wanted a similar job so now we outsource to Asia for example where the labor is cheaper. Those people have just as much of a right to work as anyone else. As a result goods are cheaper and we become wealthier. Now we in a late transition to a service economy (technology, supply chain, distribution, sales, etc) which is a level above industrialization and provides another layer of value. Industrial jobs have moved to service jobs. Unfortunately along the way the government gets involved because politicians don’t understand free markets and how they benefit the people in the long run. So many laws, regulations and extraction/transfer by force makes things much more inefficient. People like Zuckerberg created new wealth. I did not create Facebook so I did not earn that amount of wealth. There will always be rich and poor because people are different (smarter, work harder, etc). But the rich and corporations do take advantage of a large government and end up receiving a higher amount of transfers to themselves. Only way to fix this is to reduce government so there is no one to lobby or bribe with campaign contributions etc. The people voted for a big government and we are paying the price. The problem is not free markets or the people. The problem is the state. Read Murray Rothbard’s “Anatomy of the State.”