US second-to-last of 22 countries in percent of workers who own their own businesses [View all]

[HiPointDem]

Where the independent pharmacist counted pills, we see a CVS employee. Where family livestock farms dotted the landscape, we see immense operations run by Smithfield and Tyson... Where our community bank stood, we see Bank of America. Where the local grocer marketed local fruit, we see Wal-Mart. Where the local general-merchandise store stacked jeans, we see, well, Wal-Mart again. It's not only mom-and-pop operations that are vanishing. It's also smaller advertising agencies, law firms and medical offices. It's happening, too, in the pharmaceutical and software industries, which only a decade ago displayed vibrant competition among upstart ventures.

One recent study, based on data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, placed the United States second to last out of 22 rich nations in the percentage of workers who run their own businesses. Only Luxembourg ranked lower.

The American small business is increasingly becoming an American myth: Self-employment in nonfarm businesses has fallen by nearly half over the past 50 years...

Yet specific political moves and decisions in Washington over the past several decades have made it much easier for the people who control large-scale corporations to displace small proprietors... One of the most important was a radical change in 1981 in the enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws. Until then, small entrepreneurs were protected by a legal framework created during the Second New Deal, which began in 1935.

Many histories of the era focus on the FDR administration's initial decision to all but suspend antitrust laws. But after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, the administration (along with numerous populist allies in Congress) reversed course and adopted a very aggressive competition policy designed to protect citizens against excessive corporate concentration... Instead of protecting competitive markets, Reagan officials said they would use anti-monopoly laws to promote "consumer welfare," which they defined largely as lower prices. It no longer mattered how much power was consolidated, as long as the consolidation appeared to result in the delivery of less-expensive goods...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/19/AR2010021902043.html

Travel in europe & asia made me aware that the reason those countries had a more vibrant small business community (& thus, most interesting big cities) was very often that they had a political/legal structure specifically designed to protect them.

The US, otoh, increasingly resembles a corporate monoculture, a kind of desert.