Elizabeth Nolan Brown anticipates the joy of bidding good riddance to Lina Khan.
Even before being appointed FTC Chair, Khan was one of the leaders of a strange—and often infuriating—school of thought about antitrust law. Known as neo-Brandeisians, new structuralists, or sometimes (by critics) as “hipster antitrust,” this school dismissed the idea that antitrust’s purpose should be to protect consumer welfare. Instead, neo-Brandeisians were concerned with an abstract promotion of competition—a fixation leading to the conviction that businesses getting too big, successful, or dominant was itself something to be feared and stopped.
Proving actual harm to consumers was out; proving that practices harmed a big business’ competitors was the new game. But under these rules, doing anything that successful businesses do—including innovating, bundling products for improved efficiency, and acquiring new products—could be considered part of an antitrust law violation.
As you might imagine, this is a philosophy that could prove bad for not just business but for consumers, too.
It also proved legally dubious. Under Khan’s leadership, the FTC has embarked on a series of enforcement fiascos and racked up an impressive roster of losses in court. This has been the silver lining of Khan and her ilk’s novel ideas about antitrust law: they’re often out of line with modern legal standards for how to interpret antitrust cases and current conceptions about the proper role of the FTC.
Colin Grabow warns that the Biden administration wants to tighten the protectionist Buy American Act.
Ann Bauer explains why, in 2024, she voted voted against the Democrats. A slice:
My people were so bathed in righteousness, they’d become a living satire. For three months, I sat on a Minnesota water-conservation board with wealthy travelers who kept golf courses green while recommending water rationing for farmers. The group’s leader proposed we stage a “Pearl Harbor level” event that would scare the public into taking shorter showers.
Any objection to such ideas is met with gentle murmuring about xenophobia or fascism. Yard-sign speech is rhetorical kryptonite, especially in an all-blue place.
That’s what Americans like me voted against. We didn’t vote for Mr. Trump. We voted to stop the cancerous mutation of well-intended ideas, misused by institutions, turned self-serving and dictatorial by an elite few. This is the story of so many catastrophes, from Lysenkoism and the internment of Japanese Americans to weapons of mass destruction and the Patriot Act. We’ve been watching parallel manias unfold on myriad fronts.
In a world with a competent press, Mr. Biden’s failing constitution would have been front-page news in time for Democrats to confront the unpleasant (yet manageable) reality of needed change. A primary would have produced a tested nominee, likely one less encumbered by the Biden record. As Harris adviser (and Obama veteran) David Plouffe complains that Team Biden created a “hole” too “deep” for his sidekick to dig out of, don’t forget the industry whose job it is to call out political fiction, but instead wrote the “Joe Is Fine” novel.
Arnold Kling decries the anti-intellectual turn of much of higher education in the U.S. A slice:
I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to lose sleep over higher education in America. This was in the Spring of 2012, at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Brandeis University. The main graduation speaker was in the midst of a not-memorable talk when she said “and I read this morning in the New York Times that America will be more than 50 percent non-white by 2050.”
To me, this would have been a straightforward observation, neither good news nor bad news. But the students greeted it as if they had just heard that their favorite sports team had won a championship or their favorite political party had won an election. They whooped and hollered and cheered for several minutes. It was by far the biggest applause line of her entire speech.
That outburst made me want to ask for a tuition refund. I realized that the students had been taught to be reflexively anti-white. At an institution where young people are supposed to learn critical thinking and careful perspective-taking, they instead had acquired a simple-minded way to view the world: minorities good, white people bad.
Under Biden, the rest of the world has been following the U.S. in implementing more-invasive industrial policies to further subordinate economic production to government’s will — except Javier Milei in Argentina. It would be great to see a reversal of that trend under Trump — and to see the U.S. no longer leaving Milei stranded in his quest for shrinking government.
The biggest hindrance to appointing Massie secretary, though, will be other Republicans. Agriculture socialism is bipartisan, and many of the top agriculture states are represented by GOP senators. If Massie were to be confirmed, it would almost certainly be conditional on his promising to not go full Milei, even though that is what the USDA needs. Any major reforms would also face opposition from the interest groups that benefit from them and the bureaucrats who would be tasked with implementing them.
GMU Econ alum Jon Murphy discusses a problem with government planning of the economy.
Michael Peterson reports on Argentina’s economic progress under the leadership of Javier Milei.
