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Big business

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The simple opposition between the people and big business has disappeared because the people themselves have become so deeply involved in big business. - Walter Lippmann.

Big business are large-scale corporate-controlled financial or business activities. As a term, it is typically used to describe activities that run from "huge transactions" to the more general "doing big things."

Quotes

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A to H

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  • Making movies has become such a golden ring, and it's all such a big business, that the rewards system has gotten totally out of whack. Suddenly, you're treated in a manner befitting someone who is actually an important person.
  • War is big business. It's a lot of money going to and fro, and unfortunately a lot of angst, and a lot of fear, and a lot of doubt. And eventually a lot of wonderful people, like soldiers, like men and women that are out there trying to do the best they can, they come back being wounded on many levels.
  • Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.
  • We believe that there is one economic lesson which our twentieth century experience has demonstrated conclusively—that America can no more survive and grow without big business than it can survive and grow without small business…. the two are interdependent. You cannot strengthen one by weakening the other, and you cannot add to the stature of a dwarf by cutting off the legs of a giant.
    • Benjamin Franklin Fairless, president of United States Steel Corporation, Congressional testimony (April 26, 1950); reported in Study of Monopoly Power, hearings before the Subcommittee on Study of Monopoly Power of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 81st Congress, 2nd session, part 4A, "Steel" (1950), p. 466.

I to Z

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  • Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
  • We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return we must insist that when any one engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal.
  • Big businesses can be big in different ways. They can be big absolutely, like Wal-Mart— with billions of dollars in sales annually, making it the biggest business in the nation— without selling more than a modest percentage of the total merchandise in its industry as a whole. Other businesses can be big in the sense of making a high percentage of all the sales in its industry, as Microsoft does with sales of operating systems for personal computers around the world. There are major economic differences between bigness in these two senses. An absolute monopoly in one industry may be smaller in size than a much larger company in another industry where there are numerous competitors.
    • Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 7. Big Business and Government
  • Most big businesses are not monopolies and not all monopolies are big business. In the days before the automobile and the railroad, a general store in an isolated rural community could easily be the only store for miles around, and was as much of a monopoly as any corporation on the Fortune 500 list, even though the general store was usually an enterprise of very modest size. Conversely, today even multi-billion-dollar nationwide grocery chains like Safeway or Kroger have too many competitors to be able to set prices on the goods they sell the way a monopolist would set prices on those goods.
    • Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, 4th ed. (2010), Ch. 7. Big Business and Government
  • The best way to support dreams and stretch is to set apart small ideas with big potential, then give people positive role models and the resources to turn small projects into big businesses.
    • Jack Welch (2001) Jack: Straight from the Gut Ch. 3.
  • Government or politics in America today is big business. Everybody makes money involving themselves in one way or the other, whether it's pollsters, whether they are policy wonks, whether they are pundits, whether they are those who believe that they must call it as they see it and then to be fair about it.

See also

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Wikipedia
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