“Progressive” politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren are becoming more fashionable, and it follows that attacking big business is back in vogue. “Political and academic progressives expand their frenzied attacks on ‘wealth’ and on the alleged transgressions of ‘big business,’” writes Dominick Armentano, Professor Emeritus in Economics at the University of Hartford.
What is it about human nature that drives these attacks? Perhaps we must look to Ludwig Von Mises for an answer. But first, we can get a general idea of how the anti-big-business impulse remains so popular by looking at the work of economist Tyler Cowen.
In April, Cowen published his latest book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero, documenting how “Most young Americans hold highly critical perspectives on capitalism.” Indeed, the Harvard Kennedy School produced a report on young adults, revealing 51 percent did not support capitalism. Furthermore, 33 percent endorsed socialism as an alternative.
Clearly, that 33 percent is ignorant to the Two Reasons Why Socialism Repeatedly Fails;
1) the impossibility of economic calculation without true market prices, and
2) the lack of an incentive to produce only what consumers actually want.
Nevertheless, support for socialism endures, and we don’t have to look further than our TV screens and Twitter to observe what may be the one of the key points of origin of this critical narrative against big business. Yet this negativity is driven by more than radical rhetoric from the left-wing media. The very nature of media coverage has an effect.
Cowen adds, “Virtually all media outlets have a significant bias toward negative news of all kinds, including news about business. So scandals, corruption, and abuse of workers all receive much more publicity than the normal, everyday massive successes of America’s major corporations. “Corporations had another stellar day producing things and keeping people employed,” just isn’t a great news headline.”
Furthermore, big business is blamed for the failings of big government. We need look no further than the Occupy Wall Street movement. As the angry masses protested on Wall Street, a more appropriate place to fight for freedom was a short walk away: three blocks north of Wall Street at 33 Liberty Street sits a brownstone building — the home of the Federal Reserve.
Yet, there was little interest in addressing the outsized role of the Federal Reserve in manipulating the global economy. This blind spot for the role of the central bank illustrates just how wrongheaded are many leftwing approaches to diagnosing the source of our economic problems.
Protestors would do well to consult Austrian Business Cycle Theory which helps explain how the stock market crash and economic downturn were attributable not to “big business,” but largely to a prior bank credit expansion by the Federal Reserve and the Fed-regulated banking sector.
Yet, anti-capitalist agitprop spreads through social-media like typhus through the Gulags, even though it is private capital and private business which has made social media possible.
This sort of thing is nothing new. As Ludwig Von Mises wrote, “All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out.”
