On April 18, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program lent out the last of $349 billion it had on hand in emergency funds. Efforts are underway to ensure that those billions will not be the Program’s last.

Meanwhile, others question whether small business should be saved. Paris Marx calls for nationalization of large companies rather than subsidization of smaller ones, asserting that if the handful of the former dominating the tech industry were replaced by the latter, “network effects would simply cause a re-monopolization in the future” (“Build Socialism Through the Post Office,” Jacobin, April 15).

However, the billions flowing through the SBA won’t match the trillions in bailout money for big business — or the indirect benefits to the latter that go unseen.

A decade before the Wall Street Journal reported that SBA funds are often “either too late in coming or won’t provide enough cash” for small businesses (“Small Businesses Opt To Close Despite Aid,” April 16), The Nation‘s Alexander Cockburn noted that “whatever backwash they got from the stimulus often wasn’t readily apparent” in the wake of the 2008 recession. They were being “stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while the big fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions,” yet “the left disdains them.”

The manifesto of an earlier Marx argued that the support for small business still widespread among socialists at the time amounted “to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means.”

Yet many of the industrial age’s biggest economic changes came from outside the gargantuan organizations that dominated it. Ralph Nader and Mark Green observed that “The firms which introduced stainless steel razor blades (Wilkinson), transistor radios (Sony), photocopying machines (Xerox), and the ‘instant’ photograph (Polaroid) were all small and little known when they made their momentous breakthroughs.”

The economic regulations enacted during America’s Progressive Era were what historian Gabriel Kolko called The Triumph of Conservatism rather than of Progressive (or Marxist) values, keeping the biggest competitors on top by shielding them from smaller upstarts. Kolko emphasized how the Federal Meat Inspection Act’s safety regulations went easier on large meatpackers, even if they engaged in riskier practices than smaller ones.

Peter Kropotkin related how the organizers of the English Lifeboat Association, “not being Jacobins, did not turn to the Government” that lacked “the co-operation, the enthusiasm, the local knowledge” of voluntary efforts. Kropotkin’s words inspired modern efforts to help out during emergencies like Occupy Sandy, and heeding them may save the economy of the 2020s.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Small Business Versus the State,” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 04/18/20
• “Small Business Versus the State,” by Joel Schlosberg, River Cities’ Reader [Davenport, Iowa], 04/20/20
• “Small business versus the State,” by Joel Schlosberg, Creston [Iowa] News Advertiser, 04/21/20
• “Small Business Versus the State,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 04/23/20

Roger Simmermaker takes the The Wall Street Journal‘s editors to task for warning that Donald Trump will “lose” a “war with the laws of economics” if he wages a trade war with China (“Washington and Lincoln Were Also Tariff Men,” December 13). Simmermaker admits that Trump’s tariffs will reduce the availability of imported goods to domestic consumers, but simply considers buying American instead an inherently good thing.

Simmermaker notes that Trump is by no means the first American president to enact tariffs. He quotes a lineage of eager support for restricting trade running all the way back to George Washington. In an earlier column, Garrison Center director Thomas L. Knapp explained why: “Tariffs help a few people visibly and in a big way, while harming a lot of people far less visibly and far less noticeably. Politicians typically love policies like that because such policies allow them to rack up votes and campaign contributions from some constituencies without enraging others.” Teddy Roosevelt’s proud embrace of the tariff created far more trusts than he busted; its opponents at the time aptly named it “the mother of trusts.”

Simmermaker makes it clear that he doesn’t value the economic well-being of the Chinese as much as that of his fellow Americans, but he would have to be particularly spiteful to harm the latter by cutting off mutually beneficial trade with the former. As the genuine populist Henry George noted in 1886, “Trade has ever been the extinguisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser of knowledge.” Simmerman should take heed of George’s warning that “What protection teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.”

Simmermaker asks why, if tariffs are so economically damaging, has the United States, whose Constitution “never mentions free trade or free markets,” prospered with such a long history of them? Indeed, the new nation’s laws promptly set about the same “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world” that the Declaration of Independence denounced the British monarchy over. Yet it retained enough that Bertrand Russell noted “the leadership [in international trade] has passed to the United States” — the country that had the best chance of replicating the golden ages of previous merchant havens like Italy and Holland. Ironically, American newspapers can still afford to run letters like Simmermaker’s in large part because Trump failed to enact tariffs on inexpensive newsprint from Canada.

The United States has also had the advantage of a huge internal expanse for its economy to reap the benefits of borderless trade. In a time when the Civil Aeronautics Board imposed the economic equivalent of tariffs on airplane flights between states, the airline Southwest was able to supply low-cost air travel within the vast state of Texas. After such barriers were repealed, their advertising told consumers that “You are now free to move about the country.” Similar gains from trade need only not be blocked to soar around the globe.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Protectionist Presidents are the Parents of Our Country’s Trusts,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 12/18/18

Amazon.com’s plans to establish  a pay minimum of $15 an hour for all its domestic workers (Day One: The Amazon Blog, October 2) come across as the real-life version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons turning his nuclear power plant into a community garden. The Internet sales Goliath is by far the largest company to have taken up a wage floor that is among the main demands of critics of its labor practices, with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos inspiring Senator Bernie Sanders’s Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act. Sanders has pivoted to commending the same Bezos his “Stop BEZOS” proposal demonized.

Has the avowed socialist simply accumulated enough political power to beat up on business with a long-shot bill symbolizing the force of piecemeal lesser measures? Or has a well-meaning but impractical gesture lucked into sparking a real concession?

Critics point out that the specific mechanic of the Act — taxing larger companies the full amount their employees get from welfare programs — suffers from the perverse incentive of making it less worth employers’ while to hire the most impoverished applicants. Yet it is not simply the case, as Jonathan Chait protests, that “social welfare benefits workers, not their bosses.” In observing that measures seemingly championing the underdog can in fact become corporate welfare, Sanders is more perceptive than Chait. Sanders grasps the outlines of “corporate liberalism” as exposed by a half-century of research by historians like Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, and Joel Spring.

Amazon’s promise that “our public policy team will work with policymakers in Washington, D.C., to advocate for a higher federal minimum wage” is merely the latest example of dominant firms collaborating with government to design regulation they welcome because its costs fall most heavily on others. From safety measures (Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916”), to transportation infrastructure (Kolko’s “Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916”), to workforce training (Spring’s “Education and the Rise of the Corporate State”), legislative mandates and standardized requirements stop competitors from doing things better for less, and often from even entering the market in the first place.

In attempting to take back such ill-gotten gains, the Stop BEZOS Act doesn’t go far enough. Money would be left in the pockets of the neediest by measures like the Mobilization for Incremental Tax Exemption — an across-the-board removal of the lowest income earners from the tax rolls endorsed by both William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism director Thomas Knapp and “Bernie: A Lifelong Crusade Against Wall Street & Wealth” author Darcy Richardson.

Opportunities to earn more would expand as structures of corporate liberalism recede. The book industry, for instance, would no longer be artificially routed through an Amazonian mega-river — on Beltway-built ships — but would tend to eddy around the communities it serves. It would look less like a centralized Amazon warehouse than like the local touch and personal service of year-old Kew & Willow Books of Queens, New York — founded by employees of a nearby closed Barnes & Noble with knowledge of the trade and the neighborhood.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org).

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Amazon’s $15 minimum pay is a hollow gesture,” by Joel Schlosberg, University of New Mexico Daily Lobo, 10/08/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 10/11/18
• “Can’t Stop the Bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 10/14/18
• “Can’t stop the bookstore,” by Joel Schlosberg, Pahrump Valley [Nevada] Times, 11/07/18