Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee held an extraordinary hearing, challenging an entrenched consensus that has dominated for nearly four decades. Lawmakers and panelists didn't debate a new law but the interpretation of a century-old one. And in the process, they revealed something about how corruption works in our key institutions. It's not solely about self-enrichment or looting the treasury on behalf of donors. It's about closing off debate, building a wall around critical decisions so only they and their friends get to weigh in. This cloistered, pinched, incestuous establishment went on trial last week, and it didn't fare well.
The hearing concerned the “consumer welfare standard” for antitrust law, a concept conjured up by Robert Bork and his pals at the University of Chicago in the 1970s. Under this standard, mergers are judged under the Sherman and Clayton Acts based solely on whether they provide benefits to consumers. Other by-products of market concentration—negative impacts on worker wages (as shown in a compelling new research paper), squeezing of suppliers, fragility in the supply chain, reduction in innovation, and constraints on personal liberty and democracy—sit in the background, behind the consumer-based frame. It essentially cuts people in half, presuming that only their rights as buyers of goods matters.
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