In the absence of any rational criteria of judgment, people attempted to judge the immensely complex issues of a free market by so superficial a standard as “bigness.” You hear it to this day: “big business,” “big government,” or “big labor” are denounced as threats to society, with no concern for the nature, source, or function of the “bigness,” as if size as such were evil. This type of reasoning would mean that a “big” genius, like Edison, and a “big” gangster, like Stalin, were equal malefactors: one flooded the world with immeasurable values and the other with incalculable slaughter, but both did it on a very big scale. I doubt whether anyone would care to equate these two—yet this is the precise difference between big business and big government. The sole means by which a government can grow big is physical force; the sole means by which a business can grow big, in a free economy, is productive achievement.

- Ayn Rand. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966).