Living Amongst The Fossils Of Too Big To Fail

An Idea In Denial Of The Ecosystem

by Paul Grimsley

Some of the companies that are still around should not be — they are like the T-Rex and Apatosaurs brought back to life in Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs aren’t around because they couldn’t adapt — our dinosaurs are around because they somehow pushed the idea that civilization would collapse if they disappeared. It isn’t true — it might mean a period of hardship, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t pull out of it.

When larger companies died in the past it cleared the way for smaller companies to expand to fill the need. Some of the banks, being incorporated, were deemed to need living wills to protect people because their demise would impact so many. This is wrong, and it goes against the tenets of the so-called free market economy. Why should it be that you sink or swim depending on the success of your product or service, except if you are at the top of the foodchain? The laws should be there to protect the individual and their assets, not those of the people who caused the problem in the first place.

These companies and the way they were operating, and in some cases still are operating, are responsible for creating the climate which is killing them off — them and a government which artificially prolongs their lives. They are failing for a reason, and that reason is generally not a lack of money. They may have a lack of money as a symptom of the bad business practices that they have been engaged in, but pumping more money into them would be like giving a gunshot victim a blood transfusion without stitching up the wound — it’s all going to leak right out.

This train of thought was kickstarted by reading an article talking about T-Mobiles push to get the FCC to take away the 3.5 GHz shared spectrum, which would seriously hurt a lot of small carriers.

Is it idealistic to believe in a meritocracy? Can you expect ethics where considerations are fiscally driven? Should we just surrender to the notion that money and might is right? There is a notion that nice guys finish last, and maybe that’s true, but should it be?

Some people want to throw money at a problem to make it go away — and sometimes that problem is what others would consider to be fair play. If you have enough money to rewrite the rules, to move the boundaries, to tear up the map, why shouldn’t you? When the government is complicit in creating this kind of atmosphere and making it OK to operate this way, how can they turn around and push back on companies doing the same?

Money is working to kill Net Neutrality; money is working to kill Environmentalism; money is seeking to deregulate every industry possible. If you are unemployed and this gets you a job, are you going to have the luxury of caring about rainforests, rare orchids, and close to extinction Big Cats? Self interest is what is appealed to, and it seems to be the raison d’etre of these organizations, and most of them seem to working very hard to shortcut and circumvent the very type of economy they claim to champion.

In the current state of constant disruption, too big to fail seems even more untenable — it can’t just be that disruption and radical reform takes the form of deregulation and dismantling the apparatus designed to protect people from unscrupulous business practices; it also needs to be radical in the upsetting of the smooth sailing status quo and monopolies that are getting more and more locked into place at the top of a food chain that has less and less steps between the top and bottom tiers. The transnationals have their hands directly in our pockets now, and they are killing the middle-men; killing the strata of people who at one point would have been the source of diversity. Amazon is becoming the cloud with AWS, and as we saw, it affected a lot of people when they had a problem; they promise to do the same with the retail grocery sector too. There are many reasons not to centralize everything — to put all your eggs in one basket. Choice is one, and may be the most important — choice means a market that competes for custom, not one locked down and controlled by a single company.

Too big to fail? Too homogenous to survive. Not diverse enough.