LAS VEGAS—The mom-and-pop concession stand on a northern Iowa lake rented boats, sold snacks and beverages, stocked bait and tackle, and offered tips to visiting fisher folk about where to cast a line.
In the fall, it sold shotgun shells for the hunters who replaced the boaters and anglers during deer seasons, making it worthwhile for the concession to stay open into late November.
For that, the small business was essentially shut down without notice other than a message from its electronic transaction processor stating, “We can’t do business with you” because its corporate policy prohibits sales involving firearms or ammunition.
“Their credit card processor ‘deplatformed’ them, and that is when we stepped in,” American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce (AmFree) CEO Gentry Collins told The Epoch Times.
“We connected them with processors” that facilitate transactions without any ideological overlays and at a “competitive retail rate” to boot, he said.
Discrimination against the firearms industry by banks and transaction processors in denying financial services—and the emergence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) prioritized investment policies—are “the most common ways that legal businesses are being denied access to the market,” Collins said from AmFree’s booth at the Shooting Hunting Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show in Las Vegas.
These policies, adopted by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, PNC, Goldman Sachs, and PayPal, among others, are examples of “woke capitalism” that seven Republican governors pledged to combat during a Jan. 19 SHOT Show forum.
“I’m not going to let some banks or processing companies discriminate in our state,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said, vowing to “not allow wokeness to trample our freedoms.”
That’s easier said than done, however, when big banks, big processors, and big businesses rule the roost with few alternate financial service providers available to small and mid-sized businesses.
There’s a growing number of vendors that will provide financial services for businesses that face corporate discrimination. It’s the role of advocacy groups, such as AmFree, to promote those vendors and to lobby on their behalf.
An Organization Committed to Free Enterprise
AmFree was launched in April 2022 by “concerned people who started this as a passion project,” Collins said, including former Iowa Gov. and Ambassador to China under the Trump administration Terry Branstad, who serves as chair, and general counsel William Canfield, a six-time Republican presidential campaign general counsel.
“There is a need for a national chamber organization that was committed to the principles of free enterprise,” said Collins, a former national political director at the Republican Governors Association and the Republican National Committee. “We need a free enterprise chamber to fight against burdensome regulations, job-killing tax policies,” and progressive policies that target businesses in industries they dislike.
“There is an attempt in our economy to force culture change that can’t be won at the ballot box. That’s what we’re fighting.”
The most vulnerable are small- and mid-sized businesses, which is why AmFree’s annual membership fee is just $99. About 8,000 businesses have signed on, Collins said, noting that those who join at the SHOT Show are eligible for “discounted memberships.”
Collins said the low membership fee is applied to any business, regardless of size or the nature of its products or services, with a growing prowess of “aggregated small businesses.”
This allows AmFree to avoid an issue that plagues many membership advocacy organizations, he said.
“Associations get wrapped up in who can write the biggest checks. We wanted to start the other way around,” he said.
AmFree, based in Ankeny, Iowa, near Des Moines, lobbies primarily at the federal level, with a laser focus on ensuring equal access to markets for small- and mid-sized businesses squeezed out by corporate behemoths, according to Collins.
For years, most Americans heard complaints about businesses “being treated unfairly in the Chinese marketplace,” he said.
“But we have as many problems with small businesses trying to get access to the open market in the United States, so why don’t we start with that?” Collins asked.
Impeding free enterprise by depriving small- and mid-sized businesses equal access to markets isn’t merely an economic issue—it’s an existential one, he said.
Restoring What Was Successful Before
The free enterprise economic system that flourished in the United States during the 20th century, the “American Century” as Collins described it, has profoundly changed the world for the better. Among the examples that he cited was global life expectancy increasing from about 30 in 1900—which it had been for millennia—to 76 in 2000.
“One single ‘American Century’ more than doubled global life expectancy,” he said, noting that instead of depravation, “diseases of excess” are the lead causes of death.
“Easy market access for small- and mid-sized businesses is what fueled the ‘American Century.’ That is what created the innovation, the progress,” Collins said. “We’re losing that. A lot of people are being pushed out of business. Now, if you had a better idea, you could not get it to market.”
AmFree has a 10-principle Bill of Rights that, among provisions, states that “free, fair, open markets are a global force for good” and that “the role of government should be limited, transparent, and fair.”
They’re simple, baseline principles that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce used to practice but no longer seems interested in upholding, Collins said, calling it “the old chamber.”
“Everywhere we go, we find a hunger among small- and mid-sized businesses, a real lack of representation in this policy discussion” by “the old chamber,” he said.
AmFree volunteer Robert Ellsworth, a small business owner of Leesburg, Virginia, said profitability should be determined by “objective decision, not subjective decision” exerted by corporations that can hold the nation’s financial systems hostage.
“Of all the challenges” small businesses face, it’s sad when one fails because “of things that were out of its control,” he said.
Two men approached Collins and Ellsworth at their booth, thumbing through the pamphlets, stickers, and pens available to takers. It turns out that they own several shooting ranges and they, too, have been blackballed by their credit card processor, disrupting their operations and putting jobs at risk.
“That is why we are at the SHOT Show,” Collins said.
