Small Business: What is it really?

I was reading a couple of articles about how Gov. Romney said he was in favor of small businesses and he wants to create new jobs I could not help but think of how he thought of himself as a man of the people.  In today’s debates he constantly was saying how if elected, together we will bring a new generation of economic prosperity and he looked very confident up there as well.  I wonder what he means when he says he is for “small” business and in this very interesting piece by James Surowiecki, he writes how “Romney might be small when it comes to helping people, but big when it comes to big business”.  However, this isn’t groundbreaking news to anybody who knows about this country’s industrial beginnings.  Ever since the days of the railroads, government and big businesses has been to say the least, “intertwined with one another”.  Starting with a law that was passed in 1872 saying that the federal government can lease land for five dollars a month, and if the government or the mining industry  can find any gold, silver, uranium, etc, that they could keep all of it and get this...the individuals would not get a single dime out of it.  Not only that but they also allow tax breaks and subsidies to farmers, corporations, banks as an incentive to keep them here in the country.  This has been going on since the days of Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and you would think that the public would have taken to action by now but it’s not that the people haven’t voiced their concerns its that the government follows where the money goes, which is big business.

Big beneficiaries of corporate welfare include the banks, and of course, the ethanol (oil companies).  The banks want you (the people) to think that the government will never allow the F.D.I.C to fail which creates the illusion that is safer for you to deposit money in the federal bank, as well as it allows them to borrow money at such a low cost.  But it seems that year after year we have another story about how the government has to bail out this bank after “risky business decisions” have almost run it into the ground, and our money has to help them out with that.  Well I have a better idea, how about that money is returned to their rightful owners?  Sounds crazy right?

This however takes the cake in regards to how government offers big businesses a helping hand, and it comes from an unexpected place: copyrights and patents.  The pharmaceutical companies make hundreds of millions of dollars off of federal copyrighting laws and those numbers increase year by year, and the most interesting thing about that is that it has little to no economic benefit to anyone!  In all with the election coming in a matter of weeks, I find myself skeptical in regards to what anyone says when they say the support small businesses, as everyday it seems that those words constantly change.