North Star Writers Group

Big Tobacco. Big Oil. Big Pharmaceutical. Wal-Mart. Big Insurance. The favorite boogeymen of the liberal left. Specters they raise to frighten those less informed into giving power over to the one entity they should fear above all the other Bigs. The one Big that does more damage than all the aforementioned combined. The one Big capable of seizing your property, your freedom and your liberty. The biggest Big of them all: Big Government. Conservatives should be ashamed that they have allowed the left's demagogic attacks on private-sector business to go so utterly unanswered, and ought to be raising the alarm about the true agenda that underlies them.

First, a few facts about each of the industries that liberals love to hate:

• Big Tobacco – I will not defend the tobacco company execs lying to Congress about the addictiveness of their product. It was perjury, straight up. Having said that, there are three simple facts to bear in mind: One, no one forces anyone to smoke. If you choose to do so, you alone accept the consequences and responsibility. Two, if you're dumb enough to think a cigarette won't harm you, I can't work up much sympathy for you. Lie or not, no one with two brain cells left to rub together should have believed the execs. Personal stupidity is not grounds for the awarding of legal damages. And three, last I checked, tobacco was still a legal product. If it's truly that awful, how can we in good conscience not prohibit it? (Answer: because politicans need to tax it to have revenue to spend.)

• Big Oil – The level of misinformation here is staggering. That we still have $2.75/gallon gasoline in spite of everything it takes to get crude oil refined and to market, and all the hurdles and burdens liberals in government (at the behest of radical environmentalists) put in the way, is pretty amazing. The truth is that we have plenty of domestic crude oil available if only government would let someone obtain it, build an efficient refinery infrastructure to process it and bring it to market so supply and demand could do the rest. And as for the perpetual cries of "price-gouging," yes, there is indeed price gouging. But by Big Government, taxing the daylights out of both gas itself and the corporate profits therefrom. Remember, thanks to a 30 percent corporate income tax (the third highest in the world!), government sucks up and spends about one-third of all those oil profits it so disingenuously decries.

• Big Pharmaceutical – This one is even beyond oil. Do you know that, on average, it takes roughly $800 million to fully research, develop, test and bring to market a new drug or medicine? And that this prohibitive cost is the reason the price of drugs is so high? From the Food and Drug Administration hoops that must be jumped through to finding some way to keep the trial lawyers from suing them into oblivion should something unforeseen happen, the cost involved throughout is staggering. (I marvel similarly to oil that the business keeps going as well as it does in spite of it all.) Furthermore, countries with socialist health-care systems like Canada and England are blatantly leeching off America by demanding the pharmaceutical companies sell their products well below the profit margin. How do they then make up those forced losses? By charging more in America, naturally.

The frightening truth is that we are dangerously close, thanks solely to government, to killing the pharmaceutical industry entirely. Should America follow the socialist path of other countries, there simply won't be any more new medicines created. The profits that finance new research and development, which leads to their discovery, will no longer exist. And lives will subsequently be lost that could and should have been saved. Instead of stupidly and irresponsibly demagoging, government should get rid of the FDA bureaucracy (which seems to exist only to make everything take longer and cost more, to no discernible benefit), put the trial lawyers on a leash once and for all and tell Canada and England to start paying their own damn way again. Be it by luck or design, America still has the best health-care system in the world. Not that it stops anyone from trying their level best to kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

• Wal-Mart – This is a relatively new one on the scene. And while its status as the biggest non-unionized company does drive liberals nuts (all those mandatory union dues not flowing into Democratic campaign coffers), that's not the real reason they despise it. Rather, it's simply because Wal-Mart has confounded all their usual attempts to straitjacket it, as worked in the examples above. And the result has been disastrous for the poorer folks the left claims to want to help the most. All the entry-level jobs and inexpensive goods that come with a Wal-Mart (or a Target) opening disappear when onerous regulations and costs drive them away. And the remaining businesses, not having any competition in a marginal neighborhood, are free to price accordingly (which is to say, higher). Chicago recently drove planned stores away due to its moronic insistence on ridiculously high wages. The "low" wages they decried were so "awful" that some 23,000-plus people had applied for the roughly 500 jobs at that pay scale. (Hmm, what do they know that the politicians don't?) Luckily, one store will set up shop just across the city line in an inner-ring suburb instead and avoid all that Chicago tried to lay on it, while still providing the cheaper goods and entry-level jobs so badly needed and desired.

• Big Insurance – This is also new, related largely to Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters. Apparently we're supposed to endlessly subsidize stupidity in the name of compassion so folks can rebuild (and rebuild and rebuild) in natural flood, hurricane and earthquake zones. And the moment you suggest that perhaps they should front some big insurance premiums for the privilege, so they can take personal responsibility for their choice, you get accused of being mean. If anything is mean, it's forcing one person to pay for the consequences another's poor choice (which ensures more poor choices, of course) and using phony "compassion" as a thinly veiled cover for outright socialism and redistribution of wealth.

So what is the real purpose behind all of the fearmongering? Clearly, those who spew such venom at these industries do not really mean for them to go away, if for no other reason than that they want the tax revenue that comes from them to spend. What this is really about is power and control. These industries serve as levers of power for Big Government, which can manipulate them to ultimately control people's behavior. Ironically, though, when an industry becomes big enough to be labeled "Big," it also represents a threat to the power and control of Big Government itself. Hence the rush to demagogue the very institutions Big Government not only needs but is all too often in bed with. Be afraid of all those evil oil, drug and insurance companies! Only clean, pure government can save you from them!

And there is the biggest lie of them all - for whatever bad things all the above industries may do, we can uninvolve ourselves with any and all of them should they get out of line, and in so doing, hold them accountable and hopefully motivate them to improve. The same cannot be said of Big Government. Only it can seize your property. Only it can prevent you from exercising liberty. Only it can take your freedom away. And you cannot uninvolve yourself with it or remove yourself from it, barring the use of the nearest gun and ammunition. (Just try not paying your taxes once and see.) The only Big we should reasonably fear is Big Government - the biggest Big of them all.

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