Carol Roth: Lockdowns Helped Five Tech Companies Gain Trillions in Value While Collapsing Main Street

Government-decreed lockdowns helped Big Tech gain trillions of dollars in company valuations, Carol Roth, author of The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America, noted on Wednesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Roth highlighted the arbitrary, inconsistent, and selective application of shutdowns — ostensibly mandated to reduce coronavirus transmission — which broadly exempted big box stores and online retailers such Amazon and Walmart. The world’s most highly valued companies increased their market capitalization while small businesses were forced into closures and bankruptcies.

Roth observed, “The government — over the past 16 months, [and] is continuing to do it again — has been picking winners and losers, and they’re doing it not based on data and science, but they’re doing it based on political clout and connections.”

“This has facilitated the greatest wealth transfer that we’ve ever seen in history from Main Street to Wall Street,” she added.

Government and leftist claims that “we are all in this together” in terms of lockdowns “just isn’t the case,” she remarked.

Roth noted the arbitrary determinations of supposedly “essential” and “non-essential” businesses and operations.

“The big guys — the Amazon warehouse, the Walmarts, [and] in some jurisdictions, weed dispensaries that weren’t even legal a couple years before — were deemed essential,” she said, “Somehow, people’s businesses were told by the government the most horrible thing they could be told, that they were not essential.”

She continued, “None of this was based in data and science, and [small businesses] did not get appropriate compensation [from the government] for basically subjugating their property rights for the quote, unquote ‘good’ of society.”

Large “essential” retailers benefit from consumers being denied access to small businesses due to government edicts, Roth stated.

She explained, “If you shut down a small business and people are trying to spend money and they can’t spend money with these small businesses, the beneficiaries of those sellers are those big companies — the Amazons of the world — and I think that’s pretty straightforward.”

Roth explained the role of the Federal Reserve in facilitating the transfer of wealth from small businesses to the world’s largest corporations.

She remarked, “What people don’t realize is the level of intervention by the Federal Reserve on behalf of the government and by them artificially suppressing interest rates and ‘printing money’ — and I put that in quotes, because they don’t actually print it, they do an accounting entry, they do it out of nowhere — that has really increased the value of these companies.”

Five technology firms’ valuations collectively increased by over three trillion dollars as small businesses were being artificially destroyed by government policy, Roth said.

She stated, “We had five tech companies in 2020 that gained $3.4 trillion in value at the same time that hundreds of thousands of small businesses were being murdered and millions more were struggling to survive. You had a record year for IPOs.”

“Today, we have five tech companies that are worth $9 trillion in value, and the increase in this value — if you compare the chart to the Fed printing — is almost exactly the same as the amount that the Fed has pumped into the system,” she added.

She went on, “So really, they are just maneuvering that money from savers, from retirees, who are earning absolutely nothing, and giving these tech companies not only increased value but access to capital that they can use to go out and compete with smaller businesses in the market.”

Roth concluded by warning that public compliance with abusive government decrees only encourages further abuses.