Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality

CORY DOCTOROW / 7:29 AM WED AUG 10, 2016

In the 15 years between 1997 and 2012: 72,000 small US manufacturers shut down; as did 108,000 local retailers and 13,000 community banks (fully half of America's complement of small banks!). The number of US startups has dropped by 50% since 1970. These statistics are not the result of the changing times: they're due to massive, monopolistic corporations stacking the deck against small competitors through unfair and corrupt practices, to the detriment of American growth, equality and democracy.

In Monopoly Power and the Decline of Small Business: The Case for Restoring America’s Once Robust Antitrust Policies , Stacy Mitchell from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance details the exact way that monopolistic practices have concentrated wealth in the hands of a small investor class at the expense of entrepreneurs, innovation, and the public they serve -- providing a worse product at a higher price while locking out competitive alternatives.

The pharmacy industry is the poster-child for this phenomenon: the major drug store chains monopolized the distribution of pharmaceutical products, squeezing independent community pharmacies out of business while offering preferential treatment to their own retail outlets. In North Dakota, where this practice is banned, there are more pharmacies per capita than any other state, and these pharmacies have better prices and higher customer satisfaction -- and better health outcomes --than any other state.

The Federal Trade Commission -- which is supposed to prevent this kind of abuse -- insists that there's nothing wrong with America's pharmacy sector.

Mitchell's paper documents parallel phenomena in many sectors: construction, manufacturing, retail, banking... Some categories of goods are now effective monopolies: nearly all coat hangers are made by one company, ditto sunglasses. Two companies make nearly all the packaged goods in your supermarket. Walmart gets 25% of all American retail spending. In response to this phenomenon, the DOJ -- charged with antitrust enforcement -- has simply raised the threshold for the degree of concentration that warrants scrutiny, essentially defining monopolies as competitive markets and then declaring victory in the war on monopolistic practices.

This isn't just a problem for entrepreneurs and communities: it's a problem for democracy. The bigger a firm is, the more profits it can afford to lobby for special treatment by Congress and state and local governments. Beginning in the Reagan era, enforcement against monopolies fell while their profits and political spending rose. There followed a string of monopoly-friendly laws and regulation -- and a downsizing of the American middle class and American prosperity.

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