I think that Demsas, as a highly agentic small business founder, may be conditioning her view of business a bit too strongly on her own experience, but yes, I agree.
…the existence of bad companies has convinced large swaths of the Left to view all private market activity, and even the desire to make a lot of money, as inherently suspect. This is a real shift, under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Democrats openly defended “free enterprise.” Now, instead of expecting the government to proffer a reason why regulation is necessary, corporations and individual actors need to justify their existence to the state on an ongoing basis. This distrust has manifested in an entrepreneurship gap. In one paper, economists find that Republicans are 26% more likely to start a business than Democrats.
The problem isn’t that people distrust corporations, it’s that they’ve allowed that distrust to license a comfort with heavy-handed state power that is far more dangerous than any individual company. If one of the leading-edge tech companies — one potentially worth hundreds of billions of dollars — cannot require that its products aren’t used to undermine the Constitution, what, really, is corporate power in the face of that?