And, while I have not owned a great many companies, I have owned an international engineering company (and seem to be in the process of starting a new one), So I’m familiar with capitalism.
Actually, that’s exactly what I am against. The reason big banks exist is because of government. It’s government picking winners, and when that occurs there’s always a loser. Take the failures of SVB, Signature and 1st Federal. The government in collaboration with the Fed socialized the bad assets of these banks and privatized the good assets. The good assets went to big banks. You and I had to pay for the bad assets.
There are many other reasons why there are substantially fewer small banks today than 40 years ago, but all of the major reasons are government laws and regulations.
Government’s involvement in capitalism should be protecting the mechanisms of markets, not protecting and regulating businesses. This is similar to protecting our individual rights. What is the greatest threat to individual rights and free markets? Government. Government is the problem.
What do I mean by government protecting the mechanisms of markets. All markets have a method to enter and exit. That’s starting a business and getting out of business, or investing in a business and selling that investment. Information, specifically the goal of perfect information, needs to be protected. The government’s role is to prosecute those that falsely represent products, but not limit information.
Since you asked me about big banks, I’ll use that as an example where government law and regulation, specifically Dodd-Frank, limit information to individual investors, while banks have more perfect information. Banks use more complete market information, which includes details of individual and small investors’ stop-loss and limit prices where small investors don’t have he same information.
That’s just one of the many ways government does not protect and promote the same information to everyone in a market. That allows big banks to grow bigger and in the process keep small individual investors down. Dodd-Frank also makes it difficult to enter trading securities as a business. That is done by requiring capital minimums. So a person who has, say $20k, is not allowed to trade multiple times per week, but he can give his $20k to a big bank and the have nearly no limits what they can do. There are also restrictions that keep small investors out of entire markets.
This crap is sold by politicians as protecting investors, but it is merely facilitating big banks getting bigger so they can give bigger donations to politicians. I don’t want to be protected. I’ll do that myself, and if I mistakes, I’ll learn from those mistakes. So the bottom line to me is government basically needs to limit barriers of entry and exit for businesses, which is basically getting out of the way. And government needs to promote perfect information. That is fighting and punishing fraud, and insuring all parties involved in business transactions have the same information about product and price is available. That extends across all products, so choices can be made between fundamentally different products.