Whatever market power big companies do have, they’re doing a lousy job of turning it into excess profits. According to IRS data, in 2013 corporations with receipts of less than $500,000 had higher profits than did corporations with more than $250 million in sales. The anti–Big Business crowd likes to claim that large corporations find ways of holding on to more of those profits. But the myth of Big Business as unrepentant tax cheat is not borne out by the data. Large corporations do hire top accounting firms to minimize their tax exposure, and some keep profits offshore. But even with the advantages conferred by wily accountants, the tax code favors small firms to such a degree that, in 2013, federal income tax paid, as a share of total net income, was 18.2 percent for firms with more than $250 million in sales and just 4.6 percent for firms with less than $5 million in sales. Big companies are also much more likely than small ones to be audited and to face steep penalties for malfeasance.

As for the treatment of workers, here too perception and reality part ways. The depredations of a few job cutters have earned Big Business a reputation for heartless streamlining, but employment at large businesses is in fact steadier than at small businesses. In 2015, small enterprises were four times more likely to lay off their workers than large ones. Workers employed by large firms also earned more—on average, 54 percent more than workers at small companies. Companies with more than 500 employees offer 2.5 times more paid leave and insurance benefits and 3.9 times more in retirement benefits than workers at firms with fewer than 100 employees. Large firms are also more likely to be unionized, and they employ a greater share of women and minorities than small firms do, making Big Business an unlikely enemy of progressives.

Big companies also create more net jobs. This will surely come as a surprise to many Americans, who have been handed down the hoary legend that small business is the engine of job creation. The origins of this misimpression began with David Birch, an MIT researcher, who in the late 1970s purported to show that, from 1969 to 1976, companies with 100 or fewer employees created more than 80 percent of all new jobs. A few economists have found similar results, but many others have criticized Birch’s methods and conclusions. The economist Catherine Armington found that, from 1976 to 1982, small firms were responsible for just 56 percent of new jobs, much closer to their share of total jobs in the U.S. Even Birch himself has acknowledged that his results rely on a series of assumptions very much open for debate. For example, he failed to account for the much higher rates at which small businesses destroy jobs shortly after creating them.

Even if small companies aren’t creating an outsize share of jobs, don’t we rely on them to power American innovation—to outfox complacent corporations with the kind of irreverent thinking that can only occur while wearing a hoodie? Despite the much-mythologized genius in the garage, the tech revolution owes far more to teams of scientists and engineers working in well-funded corporate labs than to college dropouts tinkering at home. The business professors Anne Marie Knott and Carl Vieregger have discovered that large firms not only invest more in R&D than small firms, they get more innovation output per dollar invested.