It's not small businesses I generally have a bone to pick with. Its the big firms and franchises that force them out of business while providing a shabby product and crappy service. And yes, maybe they eventually are forced out of business too, but all their employees, customers, suppliers and stockholders are screwed, while the samurai who run these firms move on to destroy another company and industry.

But their biggest victims are the real entrepreneurs they force out of business with their mass marketing and economies of scale. It ain't just skilled and unskilled workers who are being downsized and outsourced, it's small independent owners, too, the very class you lionize. The large firms have the accountants and lobbyists and lawyers and big trade associations to help influence government. They thrive on regulation, because they just pass the cost on to the consumer.

The Munroe example is relevant. When the land speculators came in they didn't do what Munroe did, start businesses and participate in public commercial life that developed the community. The carpetbaggers produced nothing, they were middlemen who bought and sold land, often without even seeing it. They did nothing but shuffle paper. What they did manage to accomplish was to overrule Munroe's recommendation to leave certain parts of the coastline undeveloped to provide a buffer for hurricane surge. As usual, the Commodore was right. The storm came in 1926 and it was the worst ever experienced.

They did not manage matter and energy, like Munroe and his fellow Florida manufacturers and agriculturalists, they simply manipulated the flow of data. They did it through the press, politics and the courts and the financial clout of the railroads and the banks, and they did it all through hired agents from the comfort of their offices up north.

This isn't entrepreneurial capitalism, it's commercial imperialism. You can't apply the same rules and observations developed to explain the classical competition of neighborhood whorehouses to this kind of commercial activity. This is relativistic capitalism, conducted at the speed of light, the equations are different and only those who have learned to game this system can prosper at it. Unfortunately, the community that relies on commercial activity for goods, services, jobs and taxes cannot adapt to these conditions fast enough, especially when the city slickers have plenty of money to lubricate the wheels. The new robber barons aren't going to stick around afterward and build public libraries, either. What they left instead was a real estate boom that quickly crashed and ruined dozens of other small businessmen and little entrepreneurs. History repeats itself, eh?

And this all happened long before unions and the welfare state and the government regulation of private enterprise.