MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM • January 30, 2022
Maine may finally get a Costco store, and people are excited. If it opens a store here, Costco won’t just compete with its rival Walmart but also with what’s left of the hardware, clothing, furniture and appliance stores that are owned by local businesspeople. We could lose our freedom. Louis Brandeis, a Supreme Court justice who shaped antitrust law at the start of the 20th century, observed that political power followed the money, and if corporations were allowed to get too big, a small number of them would not only control the market place, but also become more powerful than the people, making democratic self-government a joke. If we are going to get through this second Gilded Age, we’ll need to find a way to break the Curse of Bigness. ~ Greg Kesich