Obsolescence Isn't the Problem With Anti-Trust

Wayne Crews, a specialist on regulation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, warns, about hearings aimed to "modernize" anti-trust:

"What could [they] do, except resort to bribery, if they wished to exist at all?" -- Ayn Rand (Image of antitrust cartoon via Wikipedia.)

Antitrust regulation (and the term "regulation" is important to include) represents one of the largest, most visible, but widely condoned bipartisan interventions into free competitive enterprise. The implication fostered is that the federal government is automatically an impartial protector of markets rather than an impediment to that end.

We run the risk now of regulators gaining greater power and prestige as a century-old policy from the smokestack era potentially gains new strength in the age of Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

Regulation of business structure and deals in bricks and mortar didn't and doesn't typically make sense nor protect consumers, since a look back shows prices declining and output expanding without "antitrust" law.

Crews is correct, and goes on at some length about many other problems caused by the government regulating the economy. Anyone interested in opposing regulation would find his annotated bibliography about the negative impact of anti-trust regulation quite interesting.

That said, his article lacks a certain, needed edge that might explain his sense of "déjà vu" over "antitrust regulation's recent rise from the not-quite-dead." This is because, like many economists, Crews never takes a moral stand against regulation as wrong -- because the state is violating individual rights. This would be somewhat like opposing slavery -- but not quite calling for its abolition -- on the grounds, correct though they may be, that it wastes human potential, it's economically inefficient, and some of the slave drivers might be corrupt even after we spot them on ... the fact that they're slave drivers. It may well be that Crews does not have a moral problem with regulation, or that he or his editors see taking such a stand as outside the scope of their analysis. But, like slavery and its tarted-up daughter, socialism, regulation will not go away until someone begins pointing out that it isn't just a drag on the economy: It's an immoral misuse of government force.

Antitrust isn't obsolete: It was never a good idea to begin with.

-- CAV