If conservatives want to understand why socialism is gaining popularity, and more importantly, why fewer Americans are placing their faith in the free market, it comes down, in part, to a simple but crucial distinction: the difference between being pro-big-business and pro-free-market.
The two concepts sound similar. They are not the same, and they represent two fundamentally different ideologies, one rooted in defending competition, the other in defending whoever happens to be winning at the moment.
Start with why the distinction matters. Americans broadly agree that corporations hold too much power, too much influence, and too little understanding of the problems ordinary people face. According to a Pew Research poll, nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults, 73 percent, say major corporations have too much power, including 62 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats. But that power is too often blamed on the market itself, especially on the left, and increasingly on the right, under the false premise that competition naturally leads to monopolization.
There is some bipartisan agreement in views of corporate power in the U.S.; 62% of Republicans say major corporations have too much power with 83% of Democrats saying the same. https://t.co/SEmU4XEYDC pic.twitter.com/hYGkOawMEV
— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) December 30, 2019
However, that worldview has the causation backwards. Left alone, competition is the single most reliable force ever discovered for breaking up concentrated power, and the free market rarely gets credit for the discipline it imposes.
As I've argued repeatedly, nearly every economic catastrophe blamed on the free market traces back to a specific government policy: the Great Depression, worsened by Federal Reserve contraction and Smoot-Hawley tariffs. The 2008 financial crisis, fueled by government-backed mortgage guarantees and artificially cheap credit. And corporate monopolization itself, which almost never survives without government's help
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That's the real story behind rising corporate power. It's the result of government helping certain businesses climb above the market entirely, and telling the rest to go to hell. Tax carve-outs, subsidies, favorable government contracts, protective tariffs—it all teaches a company that the fastest path to market dominance runs through Washington, D.C., not through their customers.
So how is a genuinely competitive market different? In recorded history, virtually no company has ever climbed to true monopoly status without some form of government assistance, a tariff, a subsidy, a regulation written to box out smaller rivals. Left alone, the power of any one company is naturally balanced by the power of several others fighting to take its place. That's not an accident. It's the same principle the Founders built into the federal government itself: no single entity, public or private, should ever hold power that isn't checked by a rival claim on it.
That brings us back to the distinction between being pro-big-business and pro-free-market. To be pro-free-market isn't to defend Amazon, or Tesla, or Meta without question. It's to make sure the market stays open enough that none of them ever stop competing for its position. It's to ensure that the next Amazon, still small, still unproven, still operating out of someone's garage, has the same shot at unseating them that they once had at unseating whoever came before.
Any of today's giants, forced to compete in a genuinely open market, could still lose to a smaller competitor hungry enough to out-innovate them. That threat, not a company's size, is what keeps markets honest. It's what keeps businesses fighting for customers instead of favors, and it's what keeps them out of Washington instead of running it.
This is also why conservatives should be wary of enthusiastically backing every regulatory crackdown aimed at big business, even when the target seems to deserve it. That is not being pro-big business; it is acknowledging that a new compliance requirement, a reporting mandate, or antitrust rule infringes on the competitive market. That it might actually hit the small business down the street, the one actually trying to compete with that giant, and can't.
That is the distinction conservatives can't afford to keep blurring. Being pro-free-market has never meant being pro-Amazon, or pro-Meta, or pro-whichever company happens to be dominant this decade. It means being pro-competition, wary of the government favors that let any company escape it, and just as wary of the government crackdowns that, however well-intentioned, end up protecting the same giants by pricing everyone else out of the fight.
Corporate power was never a free market problem. It has always been a government one, created the moment Washington started picking winners and losers. And the sooner we recognize that truth, the sooner we can start defending the only thing actually worth defending: not big business, and not the crusades against it, but the market itself.
