It WAS a Wonderful Life.  Potters National Bank received federal bailout money as being TOO BIG to fail, though Bailey's Savings & Loan went under.  But Potters turned down a loan to the "Little Shop Around the Corner", which went  under from the competition from Fox Books when they opened their thousandth store in town thanks to financing by Potters (didn't last for long thanks to Amazoom).  Both Marcus Welby MD and HankMed closed their private practice unable to keep up with all the new regulations and took staff positions at Pottersville General Hospital.  At least, that might happen without Mr. Smith going to Washington.

In the last presidential debate there was a discussion on federal regulation.  Mitt Romney acknowledged that regulation was necessary to a free market world, but that it shouldn't be excessive.  He suggested that you can't have people opening banks and making loans from their garages, but that it had been a mistake to make a handful of banks as too big to fail and guaranteed by the federal government while a number of community and small banks had failed.

President Obama's response included: "Now, it wasn't just on Wall Street. You had loan officers were -- that were giving loans and mortgages that really shouldn't have been given, because the folks didn't qualify. You had people who were borrowing money to buy a house that they couldn't afford."  George Bailey was making bad loans?  Well maybe that was due to the pressures being put on him by the WALNUT Community Organizing group protesting in his bank and at his residence?  Weren't Chris Dodd and Barney Frank also encouraging banks to loosen their mortgage loan standards in order to increase home ownership?

In my opinion, Catholic Social Teaching calls for a distribution of wealth that would mean lowering the number of people employed by increasing the number that OWN their own Small Businesses.  BIG Government has favored BIG Business, often meaning BIG Unions with both Big Business and Big Unions making BIG political contributions.  While the two parties often seemed to be characterized as the one for the people versus the one for big business, big government tends to have excessive regulation of small business which then favors big business.  I was a bit surprised how Mitt Romney actually seemed to make that point in talking about how the classification of some banks as "too big to fail" had resulted in the closing of smaller banks.

I think what defines small business has to be greatly expanded.  Having a number of regulations starting with 50 employees or $200,000 in income seems way too small to me; and both numbers need to be multiplied by at least ten in order to truly distinguish small businesses from large businesses.  It can still be a wonderful life!