Free In Defense of America by Bronwen Maddox

power in a 1999 military coup but who, as dictators go, was at the relaxed end of the spectrum, allowed private television to start up for the first time, and thirty stations sprang up within six years. The lesson is clear: people prefer products tailored to their own tastes where they can get them.
    American Distrust of Big Business
    Another oddity of the portrayal of America as the land of uncurbed capitalism is that it ignores America’s historical suspicion about the motives of business tycoons. This suspicion has taken a most vigorous and principled form in the antitrust legislation which has underpinned American competitiveness. But it is also reflected in its literature of the early twentieth century, from Theodore Dreiser’s
The Financier
in 1912 and
The Titan
in 1914 to Sinclair Lewis’s
Babbitt
in 1922. Of course, there are parallels in European literature, but those authors are hardly writing against the grain of their countries’ economic organization.
    The rigor with which the United States is prepared to deploy its competition policy on its most successful businesses would not be replicated easily in many European countries, which remain highly protective of their own “national champions” (even if entirely happy to join America in attacking Microsoft’s market dominance). Europe’s politicians profess to believe in the benefits of free trade for both sides, even if one side can make everything more cheaply —but they do not easily shed the instinctive fear that their side will lose out.
    The Price the United States Pays for Federalism
    A third point missed by the United States’ critics is that not everything works well there, and sometimes this is the result of putting its principles of federalism (the respect for states’ rights) and its passion for curbing potential monopolies above convenience, progress, and profit. These critics imagine an America in which the pursuit of profit always carries the day, but the picture is much more complex.
    Take, for example, the restriction on banking across state borders —or even on banks having branches within one state —which has been in place for most of American history, relaxed only in the last twenty years. The United States, in contrast to most countries, spawned tens of thousands of banks, many of them tiny community ones, but has been slow to develop customer services such as nationwide networks of ATMs and debit cards. Until recently, it was a painful experience to try to persuade a shopkeeper in one state to accept a check from a bank in another.
    These regulations, reinforced after the 1929 crash with the 1933 Banking Act, put the ability of even national banks to expand in the hands of state governments. At the same time, the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separated commercial and investment banking. It was only in 1999 that Congress, after eleven failed attempts at reform in twenty years, finally managed to shed the antiquated laws and take the United States closer to the modern banking regulation it needed.
    Banking is the starkest example —given the United States’ image as the pinnacle of capitalism —of where America’s history and federal structure hamper its economy. But it has handicapped itself in the same way in telecommunications and electricity, two services whose costs affect everyone and every business in the country, and whose regulators have struggled to foster an efficient and competitive industry, and have still partly failed.
    In 2001 the world looked on, astonished, as California, whose name is synonymous with sunshine and the good life, imposed the first mandatory power cuts since the Second World War, after households had suffered months of soaring electricity bills. That was the result of deregulating electricity without having increased the supply.
    Across the country, more than a decade after the hugely ambitious 1996 Telecommunications Act, which tried to set the terms on which long-distance and local phone companies