Big Business & Big Brother

We’re witnessing the biggest merger in history. Big government and big business are getting together to tell us what to do, what to say, and what to think. And the only way they can do it is to work around the Constitution.

Sometimes this alignment is voluntary, sometimes not. Either way, it portends a profound change in the way we live—and not for the better.

An early hint of this merger occurred in 2013. That’s when the Obama Administration implemented what it called “Operation Choke Point.” The idea was to choke off a type of business—pay day lending—that the administration didn’t like but couldn’t get Congress to ban.

Pay day lenders make small, short-term loans at high interest rates. Their customers are usually in need of quick cash—for example, to pay a bill that’s due before the next paycheck arrives. This is entirely legal. Nonetheless, the Obama administration pressured banks not to process credit-card payments to these businesses or give them loans.

Banks are heavily regulated and very susceptible to government pressure. All the administration had to do was apply pressure to two banks—Four Oaks Bank in North Carolina and CommerceWest in California. Soon, others took the hint and stopped doing business with payday lenders.

State governments have taken a cue from the federal government. In 2018, New York State warned banks and insurance companies about “reputational risk” in doing business with the National Rifle Association—thereby denying it financial services.

Recently, the federal government has been pressuring social media platforms to censor speech. As we learned from the Twitter files and recent litigation, government agencies such as the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been telling the platforms what opinions they want suppressed.

The platforms have become partners with the government in suppressing freedom of speech. They voluntarily cooperate when their own views align with those of government. And when they don’t cooperate, the government pressures them to conform.

We’ve seen this before.

A foundation of fascism is the alliance of big business with government to control society, even to mold private opinion. Government privileges big business and in exchange expects its support.

By this means, our government uses banks, credit-processing companies, and social media platforms to control us in ways that wouldn’t be possible through law—in ways that evade the Constitution and its protections for free speech and due process.

And by limiting our knowledge and suppressing dissenting views, the government gets us to conform to its desires. It doesn’t bother to legislate and go to court to get us to comply. Instead, it manipulates what we know and thereby gets us to comply “voluntarily.”

That’s how government got us to take barely-tested vaccines. It censored reports of adverse vaccine events and suppressed positive information about natural immunity.

Think about this the next time you hear a government official or a Big Tech executive talking about “misinformation.” That’s code for “we don’t trust you to judge this for yourself.” Sometimes it’s even code for “we don’t want you to know the truth, because it would expose the failure of government policy.”

Fortunately, the courts are beginning to see through this ruse.

In 2023, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Missouri v. Biden, said “enough.” The court declared that the government had clearly pressured the social media platforms to censor Americans, suppressing views with which it disagreed. In no uncertain terms, the court told the government to stop.

Let’s hope the courts continue to defend our constitutional freedoms. If they don’t, America may well turn into a joint venture between government and big business.

Big business is becoming part of big brother.

If we want to keep our country free, we must stop this merger now.

I’m Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law at Columbia University and CEO of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, for Prager University.