There are many progressives who've come around to favouring mega businesses over "mom-and-pop" for: higher wages, stabler jobs, easier enforcement of regulations..
For example: Matt Yglesias
For example: Matt Yglesias
I'm neither for or against this strategy. I only wish, quixotically, the misc belligerents in policy debates would be intellectually honest.
It's ridiculous to use liberation theology terms, eg "freedom markets", when referring to Fortune 500 corporations.
If the people you have seen spouting what seems like the most progressive rhetoric do work at such places, that doesn't mean they're representative of all people who believe in progressive ideology.
It doesn't mean that the source of this ultimately deeply destructive ideology isn't the political right.
The US has been turning away from free markets for at least a century now.
Scale and logistics are good. I think they should be managed by federation (and through regulation), but I'm sick of having bosses who see my salary (rationally) as something directly coming out of their bank account. I prefer a little indirection and mediation in the relationship.
Efficiency is good for everyone. The more time and effort you save, the more time and effort you have to waste. There are scales that are ideal for particular businesses, and that scale doesn't always coincidentally coincide with the scale a small-business owner can handle. Business should be as big as real (not paper or regulatory) efficiencies can be found at, and against those efficiencies we should maximize the flexibility and ability to innovate of individual businesses and workers.
Instead we just subsidize the biggest businesses most, and through legislation create false efficiencies to subsidize them even more (and guard them from any externalities.)
Maximizing for efficiency is not. It leads to a variety of problems, including (but not limited to) a strong tendency toward consolidation of power in too few hands (thus leading to abuses), and fragile systems that break down when a shock comes (like we saw with the supply chain issues during the height of COVID lockdowns).
Anarcho-syndicalists that argue for workers councils run by experts basically got that but it comes coupled to outdated story of ownership.
In real terms the logistics and infrastructure are determined by experts but with the extra steps of getting validation from financiers who have no experience with the engineering methods, but their name is on some paperwork somewhere saying “they own that”.
I am cool with centralization effort to minimize duplication of effort. Not the kowtowing to some financier who lucked into money in the past in unrelated business, picking and choosing what I work on today as an engineer with nearly 30 years experience ranging from hardware design to kernel hacking, onto web app stacks with everyone else.
The ownership story is political double speak and corrupt expropriation of agency; replacing pols has improved economic gains for public and flushed corruption: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766