The “Small Business” Obsession

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Stacy Mitchell’s piece on Wal-Mart makes plenty of decent points—certainly it would be nice if local zoning boards didn’t kowtow to corporations at every turn, for instance—but her paean to small businesses in this paragraph looks like a sacred cow ripe for the gutting:

We’ve lost tens of thousands of independent businesses over the last decade and, with them, an important part of the fabric of American life. Small businesses contribute significantly to the vitality of local economies. They nurture social capital, disperse wealth and vest decision-making in local communities rather than corporate headquarters. They are the means by which generations of families have pulled themselves into the middle class.

It seems like the only thing you can ever get anti-globalization activists and the Chamber of Commerce to agree on is the unimpeachable virtue of small business. Now they may well “nurture social capital, disperse wealth, and vest-decision making in local communities.” That’s possible. But small businesses also tend to pay their workers less, offer fewer benefits, are much, much harder for unions to organize, and are often more dangerous places to work. They’re rarely more innovative, and they aren’t the really the “motor” behind job growth in America—at least in manufacturing, a Federal Reserve Board study done in 1997 found that “net job creation… displays no systematic relationship to employer size,” and big firms tend to create more durable jobs, partly because they engage in more “planning,” that old socialist bugbear.

The point isn’t to pile on small businesses—they’re great and many obviously have advantages over monstrous corporations, especially for their owners. Would that everyone could be his or her own boss. But some of the enthusiasm here ought to be tempered, I think. Especially since the pagan god of small business gets invoked every single time a progressive policy idea comes gurgling out of the faucet. “No, we can’t raise taxes, it will hurt small businesses.” “No, we can’t have national health care, it will hurt small businesses.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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