Dear President Trump:
My name is Phil Bell. We have never met, but I have been both a fan and supporter of yours since I was a little boy growing up in New Jersey. I served as an Alternate Delegate for you in the 2020 and 2024 Republican National Conventions. Then, as now, I admired your willingness to be outspoken and I share your views on nearly everything, from taxes to transgenders.
One thing concerns me: the attitudes I hear in Washington, DC toward large businesses. I spent a good portion of Wednesday, April 2nd, listening to the Y Combinator Little Tech Competition Summit. It was heartening to hear from founders of new, transformational businesses. Their leaders mirror you in their intellect, drive, and willingness to embrace new ideas. At the same time, the Summit included a significant discussion of antitrust “law enforcement” and a pervasive belief that small companies cannot succeed due to the presence of larger firms—meaning that government must play a role to right this “wrong.”
My chosen field of technology is railroading. This important technology plays a critical role in moving everything we need—from food to furniture—across the country on a daily basis. Rail carriers are constantly developing new tools and strategies to improve safety, while making trips faster, easier, and cheaper. I recently toured the Raritan Central Railway, a New Jersey-based shortline carrier serving Edison and Metuchen, NJ. It has grown from moving very few cars in 2001 to serving top-tier customers like Arizona Iced Tea and becoming a critical economic engine for the world’s largest consumer market.
According to the Little Tech Competition Summit, a company like the Raritan Central should be struggling. How could an individual owner and a small team with less than 100 miles of track, located in two communities, within only one state, compete…while the same industry boasts large carriers with more than 20,000 miles of track, crossing multiple states, and generating billions in revenue and profits? Yet, the Raritan Central thrives and it’s not the only small carrier that does so. It does not need the government to hobble larger players in its industry. In fact, the only thing it really needs government to do is reduce taxes and avoid the urge to over-regulate.
If government staying out of the way works for the Raritan Central Railway, the same prescription works for other industries, giving the budding entrepreneurs of yesterday’s Little Tech Summit the chance to become the Big Tech moguls of tomorrow. What they want and need from you are the same freedoms their forebears had: the ability to act, grow, and raise capital.
When Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos were “Little Tech” entrepreneurs, they were able to raise capital, in part, thanks to the understanding that if they made their companies successful, then one option to cash in on that success would be selling to a larger firm. If that option were taken off the table through antitrust “enforcement,” far fewer dollars would have been available to make crazy bets on ideas like creating Facebook or launching Tesla. At the same time, if the government encouraged companies to stay small by making every potential business decision subject to antitrust review or other government meddling, would it be possible to buy rare books & pet food from Amazon…and have both delivered to your house (anywhere in the country) be possible? Of course not…and our lives would be dramatically different.
After all, you didn’t work hard and deal with all of the ups-and-downs that came with building your business just to stay small. You reached for the heights and achieved it—and that should be the goal of every entrepreneur.
I am extremely excited to be alive for America’s new Golden Age. I am looking forward to the day when my own trains are traveling down my own tracks to do everything from carrying passengers home to their families to moving the food they will eat during their visit, and the tables they will eat it on. For this and other dreams to become a real part of this exciting epoch of American history, the ideas espoused at the Little Tech Competition Summit: harassing companies just for growing and strangling new companies before they can even get on track, must not become the rules that businesses have to live by.
Let’s build America’s new Golden Age on a foundation of freedom.
Sincerely,
Phil Bell
Future Owner of an American Railroad
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