What are some bad characteristics of big business?

Answer 1

Big business is incredibly selfish. The large corporations operate without any consideration for anything other than their profit. In particular, they do not have any consideration for people, either the people that work for them or the people who have to purchase from them. If people in one country want better working conditions the company will simply move to Another Country.

Big business is bad for competition. If a small company is doing well, the big company will either absorb it or destroy it, leaving the customer with no alternatives.

Big business is short-sighted. Oil companies have systematically suppressed all attempts to make us less dependent on oil, even though oil supplies are bound to run out and the effect of so much combustion on the atmosphere and climate is demonstrably bad. The oil companies' short term profit is more important than the long term consequences of their actions.

Big business resists change. A key example is in the marketing of recorded entertainment. Big entertainment cannot visualize entertaining people except by selling them recorded discs. When it looks like this will change, they go ballistic, inducing governments to pass ever more draconian copyright laws and internet muzzling statutes.

Big business is out of control. Time was when governments could exercise some control on business, preventing them from doing all those bad things with regulatory laws. But in the United States, and to a lesser extent in other countries, big business runs the government, preventing it from enacting any laws which would impair their profit, reducing or eliminating regulation, reducing or eliminating taxes on them, and yet at the same time expecting the government to bail them out if they spend all of their profit on executive bonuses and salaries.