I&#x27;d argue corporate welfare in large part enables Walmart to push out local businesses so easily. A <i>lot</i> of Walmart locations have gotten subsidized building permits because counties think they attract a lot of business and grow the economy. They do - in the short term - just due to scale, until every other business withers and dies. You get a slight boost from cheaper prices before you realize rather than having an internal money cycle between small businesses you now have minimum wage workers at Walmart making the Walton&#x27;s rich off your communities wealth which is rapidly going away.<p>But Walmarts core business depends on the ability to use state aid to subsidize their employees - pay them barely above minimum wage, give them all the welfare pamphlets to get medicaid coverage, food stamps, electric subsidies, etc - and that lets them outcompete everyone since they don&#x27;t have to assume any burden as a multinational business operating in a local market where their economies of scale and corporate efficiency mean nobody else can compete with them on goods pricing. Their employees make unnaturally high relative wages because they spend so much effort hooking them up with state programs to subsidize their starvation wages.<p>And a large part of why these cities are in crisis is because archaic and overzealous zoning and building codes, and an immense amount of property-as-an-investment movements in the economy for the ultrarich since 2008 put up immense barriers to natural business growth. When you have all these regulations in your way it becomes way too much of an opportunity cost to try, especially when regulations are often intentionally written to be impossible to interpret for a non-lawyer, and even remain nebulous intentionally by the corporate sponsors who had them enacted as a means to stifle competition.<p>Most of us here are in software - why? What keeps the software industry growing so much compared to almost any other business? Part of it certainly is innovation and utility, but there is no way that tech valuations are realistic or that the frequency of unicorn startups is reflected at all in almost any other industry today. And I would certainly postulate that is in <i>huge</i> part due to the incredibly low barriers of entry to developing and distributing software as a product. Everything else has huge physical opportunity costs and often magnitudes more logistical and legal hurdles that make competition impossible, so it should surprise no one major entrepreneurial growth is disproportionately coming from software.