Think small, America

America is too consolidated, too big for its own good, for its health and virtue and security.

For the centralized, money-making efficiencies of economies of scale, we've lost flavor, spice, variety and soul.

We've lost an economy that can easily survive what once was a integral component of a market system, meaning the premise that, by relying on competition, some must fail.

Our kids are too big. So are our grownups.

Our retailers are too big, too, clustered on the outskirts in big boxes that denude the landscape and make ghosts of our downtowns, our neighborhoods and our once-defining moms-and-pops.

Yes, our federal government is too big. Spending a couple of trillion dollars more than you have, largely to save an economy that otherwise collapsed under its bigness ... not good.

Some of our banks are entirely too big, as we found out painfully. And this reform advocated by President Obama doesn't much touch that issue.

That's because, you see, an entity becomes more politically powerful as it becomes economically larger. Bigness perpetuates itself by the simple fact, or inertia, of its bigness.

If Wal-Mart went down, whatever would people in the countryside do? There is nothing else capable through sheer largeness of gathering all that merchandise into that one place with that degree of availability and affordability.

That would be true in the short term, anyway. There is that old optimism about American ingenuity -- that people with an idea for making a buck would figure out how to meet the changing dynamic. But we've lost the full meaning of that ingenuity. Now we think it means gobbling up every old ingenuity that happens to be smaller.

Perhaps no one listens to Alan Greenspan anymore. It turns out he wasn't all that. But he mumbled something interesting in a speech not too long ago.

It was that a bank that is too big to fail is too big, period, and that maybe we ought to try in banking what we did early in the last century with Standard Oil. That was to direct its break-up.

What happened in that case was that the economy ended up growing through the greater accumulated wealth of the oil sector's diverse sub-parts.

Things were great until OPEC took Standard Oil's old role and America was already too laden by size for instant flexibility.

Greenspan could as easily have cited the breakup of the phone company. It does appear that telecommunications technology has advanced since then; that diverse new units within the redefined and dissipated industry have managed to make a little money and enhance the quality of our lives.

Now Obama wants to reform the financial sector. There are midterm political implications.

But he took hundreds of thousands of dollars for his presidential campaign from Goldman Sachs. He does not propose to break up big banks.

He professes to believe the better point is to regulate more toughly and shine light, not to get in the way of the great new American credo that bigness is virtue.

The only conceivable forced downswing of behemoth banks percolating in Washington stems from something I mentioned last week. It's that a corporate centrist Democratic senator from Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln, is so scared by a imminent primary challenge from the left that she, as agriculture chairman, has pushed through a provision, probably soon to be excised, to tell banks they must lose their derivatives desks -- that they must spin them out to separate entities.

This would trouble an investment bank that wanted to sell suspect investments to a chump client on one hand and insure itself against the default of that junk on the other.

When you're big enough to make money from your own disservice to customers, then surely you are too big. Even in America.

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.