A Cure for Business Cancer

I wrote last month about what I called business cancer, which is what happens when corporations grow out of control, to the detriment of the entire body around them. The best solution I could think of was to break companies apart when they get too big (as many pundits have suggested doing with Microsoft).

Longtime technology columnist Robert X. Cringley has just published an article in which he repeats an idea sent to him by a reader:

The smartest reader of all suggested that companies be taxed on their market share so that a company like Microsoft with 90 percent share would pay a 90 percent tax rate. The nice part about this idea is that it actually would encourage competition as well as industry alliances. The naive part is that it assumes legislative resolve that does not exist and also assumes Microsoft actually pays taxes which, for the most part, it doesn't. Still, the idea is clever.

Ol' Cringe is definitely right that the legislative will to do this doesn't exist. Hell, probably the majority of Congresscritters would vote against it on principle. (Yes, politicians do have principles; they just tend to be closely aligned with those of the businessmonsters they hang out with.) And perhaps the scale is too severe. Maybe set the rate at half of their market share? I don't know... I don't have the necessary economic models or numbers to crunch. But it's the kind of creative thinking needed to solve this problem.

And if you could pull off the necessary revolution to implement it, I think it could actually work. At least well enough to promote the wholesome goodness of small businesses and fair competition. Not only would it "punish" companies for getting too big, but it'd be a great tax break for small businesses, the kind that actually create most jobs in our economy. Sure the rewards for success wouldn't be as great, but maybe that would finally encourage some of these Type A drones with an addiction to "success" seminars to instead focus some of that energy on things that really matter, like family, friends, society, maybe even faith.