Bill James on small business

 How did Mayetta, with 300 citizens, sustain 4 grocery stores? People coming in from out in the county?

Asked by: matt_okeefe

Right.  300 people, but probably 600-700 farmers from surrounding areas.   And the grocery stores were small, nothing like the supermarkets of today.   When I came to Lawrence (a much larger town) in the 1960s there were still little grocery stores everywhere.  Mom and Pop operations.  

 

This relates to the question of wealth distribution.   We do have a problem in this country with wealth distribution, too much wealth in too few hands.   It's the same problem.   In what might be called an organic local economy, everyone has a role to play, nobody is truly rich but everybody makes a living and people take care of one another.   As the economic Egg grows larger, concentrations of wealth develop, but also more people get left out, can't find an appropriate role.  It becomes necessary for the government to intervene.  

 

It's like. . . .take a Banker's Box.  If you fill it with ball bearings or shotgun pellets or rice, there is almost no air left in there, because the small pellets occupy almost the entire space.  But if you fill it with bowling balls, you only have room for two or three bowling balls, so there is lots of air in there.   The same principle; the larger the units, the more space is not reached.  The smaller the units, the more completely they fill the space.  

 

The way to fight the wealth concentrations in too few hands is not to try to tax the rich; it is, rather, to break up the economic units.   If you force Amazon and Walmart and Exxon and Apple, etc., to break into smaller companies, first of all, no one is actually hurt by that, but those competing smaller companies will reach the smallest units more effectively than the large companies ever will.