As the Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney likes to point out, big business is often the enemy of free markets. This dynamic appears to be playing out now in Mississippi.

The Associated Press — the reporting of which generally should be distrusted because its new stylebook deliberately spreads disinformation about human biology — is nonetheless accurate in this report (I checked local sources) about what's happening in Mississippi:

This law will not help or protect consumers. Most people don't care about the business structure of the company that sells them their next car. This is solely designed to protect a special interest from competition.

The fact that this is being done by a conservative governor in a currently red state makes no difference. It is still precisely the sort of backward, populist economic thinking that prevented Mississippi and other Southern states from succeeding for more than a century of uninterrupted one-party rule by Democrats. In the case of Mississippi, 132 years of Democratic control of the state legislature only ended in 2010. The state needs to recover from that, but it is sadly still near the bottom of every 50-state list. Is it any wonder why?

The state government has no business telling car companies how they can sell cars. This is just an attempt by incumbent dealers and car salesmen to protect their turf against competition.

This use of government to attain a long-term economic advantage is precisely the sort of thing that conservatives and Republicans should be preventing. Free markets work, and most red states are prospering because they embrace the principles of the free market. The ones that don't, that carve out special favors for incumbent businesses at the expense of healthy, normal competition, are doomed to languish near the bottom of the 50 states in terms of economic prosperity.