Antitrust

In a true capitalist system or free market, there would be no antitrust laws.

So, whether it’s Lina Khan at the FTC or Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in Congress, antitrust advocates should take a hard look in the mirror. The only true monopoly within the US marketplace is where these politicians are fulfilling their posts. 

What Robert Reich Gets Wrong about the Kroger-Albertson Merger and What He Misses Completely

The future of gaming won’t be determined by the Microsoft-Activision merger. But it could very well be undermined if the FTC succeeds in blocking the merger.

Amazon has made its platform so attractive to third-party merchants that large numbers of them willingly pay a premium in order to continue to use Amazon’s platform.

Eleven professional golfers, including Phil Mickelson, have filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the Professional Golf Association (PGA).

Laffer pours ice cold water on Amy Klobuchar’s plans for a “hot antitrust summer.”

Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Alphabet (Google), and other Big Tech companies are not monopolies. They have achieved their dominance through competition. Success through competition is a part of competition.

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would erode the consumer welfare standard and move our antitrust model closer to those seen in communist China and parts of Europe.

Antitrust blocks the competitive process. It does so by substituting the meager knowledge and imaginations of economists, lawyers, courts, bureaucrats, and politicians for the actual, creative head-to-head competition that occurs within markets.

George Orwell famously coined the term “newspeak” in his 1949 anti-utopian futuristic novel, 1984, in which commonsense words were reversed in their meaning. Biden’s latest executive order provides a modern illustration of “newspeak” in the 21st century.

The only real monopoly is the government itself or a business given a special privilege by the government.

We can keep the term “monopoly,” but it should be reserved for describing those government-created and sanctioned dinosaurs like the US Postal Service.

“Monopoly” means either “the only firm in an industry” or “a firm with explicit, government-granted privileges that prevent other people from competing with it.” Google doesn’t fit the bill.

Antitrust legislation is an example of the government’s improper use of political power.

The tales of MySpace, AOL and Yahoo’s fall from glory shows how spectacularly wrong tech analysts can be, and how complex the machinations of a market economy are.

Hipster antitrust taken to its logical extreme involves the government using its power over firms to make them do whatever politicians feel like.

Had the government regulators not approved Bayer’s acquisition of Monsanto, human flourishing would have diminished.

The Public “Flogging” of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg

Many cities have granted monopoly power to taxi companies — the right to prevent entry by others.

Google is not limiting competition but creating it, through its own innovations that others are free to try to surpass.

New rivals who want to enter the Internet services market and are not putting together big data sets cannot claim that they have a right to the established companies’ data—they have done nothing to deserve access to it.

Congress continues to fiddle while the United States Postal Service (USPS) burns. The union for postal employees is upset that the postmaster general wants to cut 35,000 jobs. Many Americans are upset that the USPS wants to close 3,700 post offices. The postmaster...