Here is some thoughtful criticism on Berry's Jefferson Lecture. I think that there was some misreading of the lecture on the left thinking that Berry was proposing government as the answer. Broader readers would not have made this mistake. (I went back and read the First Things blog post below again.) Berry's criticism of corporations is not given its full weight even by the people who are obviously broader readers.
He is criticizing from the Thomistic/Jeffersonian position that democracies are best served by (and the republic best protected by) having many small businesses rather than fewer larger corporations. This could be tied to small farmers, but it need not be tied exclusively to them. It can be tied to small merchant shops, small schools, small factories, etc.,. These businesses are not "too big to fail." Their failure does not sink the economy. If something is "too big to fail", then it would seem obvious that in a democracy where the government is going to take out a fictional national credit card and heap mountains of debt onto the backs to tax payers to save businesses that they deem "too big to fail" that tax papers would have an interest in limiting their liability by fostering small businesses and discouraging gigantic corporations. This "discouraging" could take the form of governmental "oversight" and increased taxes. This would be replacing one sort of "orc talk" (see Returning of the King "Scouring of the Shire") for another equally dangerous type. Perhaps we could simply begin by disconnecting the corporations from their legislative servants in Washington by restricting their ability to write law through legislators. Thus, small farmers would not be chocked out of business because they have to meet rules and regs written by ADM and Cargill. Thus, small banks would not be destroyed by stress tests that were constructed to test Citibank and Goldman Sachs. Thus, it would be possible to start a college without having a couple million in the bank and accreditation on day 1. Let's start with this sort of capitalism and see where it goes. The post is still worth reading:
