Tresy Kilbourne wrote:

<<SNIP>>
>that big corporations are more efficient; that's why they tend to drive
>smaller businesses out. JKG is no shill for capitalism (no marxist
>either, but then neither's Noam); I tend to respect the freshness of his
>observations. Something to consider.

If Gailbraith isn't a pro-capitalist economist then what is he? An
anti-capitalist? We are all one or the other in the final analysis -
Chomsky is anti. I'm anti.

Lets not mice words here, we're all entitled to our opinion and we all have
different shades of opinion, but you can't stand on both sides of a barbed
wire fence.

Your point about the sentimentality around small business is well-taken
though, although they are a diverse breed. The categorisation ranges from
poor bastards trying to buy themselves a job with their redundancy payout,
who are objectively members of the working class, to ruthless scum
exploiting the working class more viciously than a large corporation could
hope or dream of.

In the latter case they are though, contrary to your assertion, objectively
quite a lot more efficient than corporations in that they will often be
able to extract a greater proportion of surplus value from their workers
than the big corporation. They have to, they haven't got the leverage of
the big corp. in terms of buying (or monopoly) power, so to compete they
have to screw their workers more to make up for the fact that the big corp.
can squeeze their suppliers better.

On the other hand the big corp. isn't quite as good (in some ways) at
squeezing their workers, the owners of the big corp. can't be everywhere so
the workers can get away with more. The big corp. usually has to comply
with labour laws too, not so the 'small businessman', he keeps his own
books, several sets quite often.

if you want to see a capitalism dominated by small business, just look back
to the 19th century, that's what it would look like. Not a pretty picture.


Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tasmania