It’s our lobbying editor Tim Carney’s thesis: As government grows, big business relies upon it more and more for subsidies and for laws and regulations that prevent competition.
Tim will love today’s Wall Street Journal piece on Wal-Mart, one of the nation’s biggest subsidy-sucklers. Its opponents — Safeway, Supervalu, for example — have been quietly taking a chapter from Wal-Mart’s book. They have been fighting back not by lowering their own prices to compete, but by funding the many campaigns to block the retailer from setting up shop in towns across America.
Big government helps keep consumer prices high. In some cases. For some people.
There is no good guy here — after all, how many billions in corporate welfare has Wal-Mart gobbled up? But this kind of behavior would never occur if big government wasn’t enabling it. It’s one more illustration of why big business loves big government and hates free markets.
