The hippies loved business and started more new businesses than had ever been seen in America before. They had no hostility to large companies unless the companies produced war matériel.
Somehow over the past 20 years there has been growing hostility to commerce. Often in the guise of hatred toward large corporations. Walmart hatred has been growing steadily. It grew largely because rural people need Walmart and understood it as a successor to Sears and Roebuck. On the otherhand urban areas have promoted hatred of Walmart encouraged by unions. Increasingly the same has been true for hatred of Target, chain restaurants and Starbucks. In the 1980s the hostility was limited to Barnes & Noble and Borders.
Now we have a president who regularly excoriates big business, the financial world and Wall Street. He is vehemently intent on imposing regulations on business and making government investment the prime source of capital formation. Every effort has been made to forestall trade expansion. The man is hostile to commerce and his hostility has found a receptive audience in the American academe, media and urban youth.
Despite this period of growing anti-commercial hostility, now represented by Democratic-union control of every city in America, many quiet commercial entities have been growing like weeds. Craigslist has become an important source of interpersonal trade as have other similar online sites. Most large cities have dynamic and growing secondhand clothing businesses. The secondary market for all sorts of products from phones to flea markets has been seeing a steady rise.
Somehow the hostility toward commerce ignores these jubilant person to person weeds.