Small business owners sell out because running a small business is extremely difficult. (They sell out
for other reasons, but it's essentially the reason that the BGA owners give, so let's go with that.)
Part of the reason for this is that they inhabit a regulatory environment that is stacked in favor of
concentrations of capital, e.g. small and large businesses alike are obliged to provide their employees
with health insurance, which is vastly more expensive per employee for small companies than it is for large.
Large-scale enterprises growing through acquisition was not always the norm. Small businesses had a much
easier time operating profitably in the 1960s than they do today, and their owners were less eager to sell out.
At any rate, growth through acquisition is a perfect example of obtaining more wealth without creating wealth.
For instance, buying a company for its intellectual property and then shutting its operations down basically destroys
the livelihoods of the workers whose jobs have been eliminated in the name of efficiency. The large company's
increase in wealth comes directly at the expense of those people, resulting in a negative creation of wealth.
All of this is made possible by policies that treat the destructive effects of capital accumulation as an irrelevant
externality. The myth (e.g. Schumpeterian "creative destruction") is that this leads to innovation, which benefits
society as a whole. The reality is that we're socializing all the risk and privatizing all the rewards.
- Reddit user uhhhclem