Overall your statement that small business owners are getting the shaft from both obsolete government regulations and big corporations which game the system to gain unfair competitive advantages is correct.
The author should have specified large corporations instead of lumping all of us in his diatribe against the worst excesses of free market capitalism.
As a small business owner, I know how it feels to get squeezed from both sides. If you aren’t large enough to afford an in-house HR and accounting to deal with payroll, withholdings, insurance, collecting and paying retail taxes, etc., running a business can be a nightmare for an owner, while your big corporate clients grind and coerce you on every bid.
But you made some specific statements that are just flat out wrong. I’m only going to examine one of them (addressing everything would take hours):
…lets be honest, government has never shown, not once, to be a good steward of ANYONE’s resources…
I can think of more than zero instances where government is a better steward of our resources than private companies. Here goes.
Health insurance
First, look at the cost of health care in our current system. The U.S. for-profit health insurance companies waste $375 BILLION in administrative and marketing costs each year.
Meanwhile, it is documented in numerous studies that going to single payer (which is not socialized medicine — it is simply eliminating the for profit middle men who run the health insurance system, creating a Medicare for all), would pay for itself with the cost savings from eliminating all the waste created by private insurance companies:
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-system-cost
War Profiteering
During the Iraq War, private no-bid contracts were given to crony insiders of Bush and Cheney resulting in horrendous abuse by private companies like Halliburton and KBR.
Contractors reap $138bn from Iraq war
A 2011 report from the commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that defence contractors had wasted or lost to fraud as much as $60bn — or $12m a day — since 2001.
Watch this documentary. It’s shocking how badly we taxpayers got screwed by the private sector.
Pharmaceuticals
On the one hand, the National Institutes of Health (a government agency) invests over $30 BILLION annually in medical research for the American people. From these grants, researchers may develop treatments from which they can profit. On the other hand, lobbyists who owned Republicans in Congress got them to pass Medicare Part D during the Bush years, which prohibited Medicare from negotiating volume discounts with the industry. Kind of amazing that the the concept of letting the free market decide pricing is against the law when it comes to benefitting the government and millions of consumers, isn’t it?
And now we’ve got the next level of anti-competitive behavior in the form of price gouging scandals like the EpiPen and the infamous Martin Shkreli (the a-hole who bought a company and then raised the price of Darprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill).
The Commons
Finally, just look at everything that is part of the Commons — police, fire, public education, military, infrastructure, food and drug inspectors, environmental protection, the list goes on and on. Look at what happens when private contractors take over these vital public needs.
End of rant.
