Better Business Bureau wants to tell you what’s good for you

If there’s one thing we learned in the midst of this financial crisis, it’s that Americans don’t like it when the government picks winners and losers in the economy. It has been frustrating to watch as certain Wall Street interests will be receiving billions in government largesse while others are left out of the lottery. Instead of letting the market forces work, while giving protections to the taxpayers, politicians are deciding which companies are necessary for the public good and which are not.

If you think the federal government is ill-equipped to make these choices, you won’t be happy about another organization that wants to decide which businesses you need and which ones you don’t.

There’s a new plan being considered this weekend that will take the same stupid mistakes being made regarding Wall Street operators to a Main Street business near you.

The Better Business Bureau has historically been a grassroots organization that set standards for best practices and denounced businesses that behaved poorly or harmed their local community. The BBB would expose these businesses in response to complaints from consumers who were cheated or mistreated.

It built a reputation that gave the organization credibility with the media, the public and the business community. But a change in policy being considered at its annual meeting is a blatant power grab that will allow the BBB to leverage this credibility against businesses of its choosing.

The policy change seems simple enough. Instead of giving businesses a pass or fail rating, it would implement a new system in which businesses are graded A-F. There will be more than a dozen factors that determine your grade, one of them being “reputation of the industry.” So instead of investigating the dry cleaner that was reported to have stolen clothes and charged more to people with poor English skills, the BBB will randomly go after industries that the board determines to be potentially dangerous or non-PC.

For industries that sell products that could be deemed unhealthy or unsafe by an overzealous watchdog, there will be a new sheriff in town to watch out for.

If the thought of another nanny organization telling you what you should and shouldn’t eat turns your stomach, hold on tight, because it gets worse. A cabal of business interests will pick lots of losers and just a handful of winners. For its program to be credible, it can only give out a limited number of A’s. So the majority of businesses will earn in the B-F category.

It isn’t good for the economy when outside organizations start attacking businesses. It’s downright dangerous when the people picking the targets have a large stake in the game. On the board of the BBB are high-ranking officials for Hershey’s, Wells Fargo and Proctor & Gamble, just to name a few. So when it’s time for industry ratings you can imagine the internal conflict about which are the biggest losers.

On the BBB’s Web site, it states that, “The basic policy of the BBB is to refrain from recommending or endorsing any business, product or service. This is done to ensure continued public trust in our fairness.” By changing its evaluation method it will lose all of its accumulated credibility and flip its policy on its head.

Richard Berman is the president of Berman and Co., a Washington, D.C.- based public affairs and communications firm.