The Business of Bigness
Last summer, Eric Dash of the New York Times wrote an excellent article on the problems associated with big business in the U.S. Dash noted that almost 100 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote prophetically about the “curse of bigness.” Justice Brandeis denounced generally the influence that big business had on U.S. politics and its economy.
Today, Brandies’s “curse of bigness” is incorporated into the less pejorative term for large U.S. companies — companies that are “too big to fail.” Certainly in light of the recent U.S. financial crisis, people are well aware of the influence that these large U.S. companies have on U.S. politics and its economy. But these “too big to fail” companies may also be creating moral hazards in business operations, and the U.S. has yet to establish a unified system for dealing with the business of bigness.