“We abandoned our antimonopoly policies,” ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell testified before the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee on Wednesday, July 14th.
“The story we’ve long told ourselves about the decline of small businesses is that they can’t compete. We assume that large corporations are inherently better and more effective, that they operate more efficiently, that they produce superior products and services. We assume that the giant corporations that dominate our economy are simply winning the competitive fight.”
“But research by my organization and the work of other scholars has found that in many sectors, independent businesses outperform their bigger rivals, delivering better services, cheaper prices, and more innovation. What’s more, we find that independent businesses perform vital functions within their industries and communities that big companies are simply unable match.”
Mitchell explains that independent businesses are disappearing because our policy choices have doomed them. Abandoning our antimonopoly policies “has allowed a few corporations to amass extraordinary market power and wield it with impunity. Rather than compete on the merits, these dominant firms have used their financial muscle and control over key chokepoints in the distribution system to exclude and crush their smaller rivals. Concentrated market power is the leading threat to independent businesses. This is what our research has found. It’s also what business owners across the country have been telling us for years.”
You can read Mitchell’s whole statement here.
You can also watch her testimony below.
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