The problem is not small businesses, the bigger a business gets the more inhuman it becomes. The best business of all is the man who is self employed and employs no one. Businesses are bureaucracies, and big businesses are big bureaucracies, and they're just as clumsy and corrupt as government, military and academic bureacracies. The fact that they're businesses does not make these bureaucracies immune from injustice, and the fact that they compete doesn't either. Rival Mafia gangs do not become more humane because they compete.

As long as we cling to the fiction that Wal-Mart operates just like the Mongolian Pit Barbecure in Mountain View (yes, I loved that place too, when I lived there in the 80s), we will never tame these monsters so that they are both productive and humane. This is not starry eyed socialist nonsense, this is a hard-boiled practical political process, a very American one, that was started in Teddy Roosevelt's administration and was working very well until Ronald Reagan's. Democracy and capitalism can work, we've had thousands of years of capitalism without democracy to see that it never does.