LETTERS: AGENCIES DIDN'T EXIST

To the editor:

It is estimated by those who create all the statistics about everything in this country that small businesses provide about 80 percent of all jobs in the country. I suppose this is so if one takes into account the ratio of small businesses in relation to large ones in small towns and the ratio of small towns to large cities.

So why is it that small businesses are constantly hounded by our government agencies with expensive and needless regulations while large businesses with assets of billions of dollars are given every advantage imaginable, such as NAFTA and GATT and government subsidies to overcome expenses of expanding into foreign countries?

These large companies already have assets enough that they can buy out any of their competitors that they consider to be a threat to them. They also have assets enough to hire an army of lobbyists to buy any laws they want passed. It is also interesting to note that our antitrust laws are hardly ever used anymore.

I can't help but notice the contrast between America and the Philippines of the 1940s. This was a time when they were emerging from two invasions by huge armies. First, by the Japanese who overran the islands, then by the American armies that drove out the Japanese. The town where I was had been flattened and rebuilt by the residents themselves without any government help. But the thing that surprised me was that the people all had money. It wasn't given to them by the government, and there weren't any factories for them to work in. In fact, I didn't see a lunch bucket all the time I was there.

At first I couldn't understand this, but upon studying the situation, I discovered that every one of the people was engaged in private enterprise. There was fishing, rice farming, wine making, stock raising and scores of small, independent merchants. None of these things are wealth-building enterprises, so how was it that everyone had plenty of money?

I finally woke up. There was no IRS, EPA, FEMA, OSHA, DOE, DOA, DEA, CIA, NEA, BATF and hundreds more agencies and organizations to drain the lifeblood (and money) from the population and channel it into the coffers of the (too large) corporations and international bankers.

RAY UMBDENSTOCK

Cape Girardeau