Reagan’s Capitalism has made U.S. 2nd to last out of 22 rich (and socialist by GOP standards) nations in small business owners
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021902043.html
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It’s not only mom-and-pop operations that are vanishing. It’s also smaller advertising agencies, law firms and medical offices. It’s happening, too, in the pharmaceutical and software industries, which only a decade ago displayed vibrant competition among upstart ventures. One recent study, based on data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, placed the United States second to last out of 22 rich nations in the percentage of workers who run their own businesses. Only Luxembourg ranked lower.
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One of the most important was a radical change in 1981 in the enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws. Until then, small entrepreneurs were protected by a legal framework created during the Second New Deal, which began in 1935. Many histories of the era focus on the FDR administration’s initial decision to all but suspend antitrust laws. But after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, the administration (along with numerous populist allies in Congress) reversed course and adopted a very aggressive competition policy designed to protect citizens against excessive corporate concentration.
In practice, this was achieved through more strategic enforcement of antitrust laws, including cases against the chain stores that emerged during the Progressive Era. For instance, the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations all took action against the A&P grocery chain, the Wal-Mart of midcentury America. The populists also promoted competition through such all-but-forgotten market laws as the Robinson-Patman and Miller-Tydings acts, which limited the ability of large trading companies to use pricing power to exert control over producers and thereby gain an advantage over smaller retailers.
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Although Americans began to hear the term “deregulation” when President Jimmy Carter dismantled the Civil Aeronautics Board, what Carter-era reformers envisioned was a shift of regulatory power from micromanaging agencies to more-hands-off antitrust officials. Soon after President Ronald Reagan took office, however, officials in his administration made clear that, to them, “deregulation” meant shifting that power from public to private hands.
Instead of protecting competitive markets, Reagan officials said they would use anti-monopoly laws to promote “consumer welfare,” which they defined largely as lower prices. It no longer mattered how much power was consolidated, as long as the consolidation appeared to result in the delivery of less-expensive goods.
A generation after the introduction of this approach, the result is clear. The seemingly endless variety of products in our stores is controlled by an ever smaller number of immense trading companies that, increasingly, charge us higher prices. And we have witnessed the greatest consolidation of economic power since the days of J.D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan.
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