Antitrust has long focused on efficiency and consumer welfare. A new generation of neo-Brandeisian trustbusters, led by FTC's Lina Khan, want to focus on the threat of concentrated economic power to democracy. A test case: Amazon's bid for MGM. My latest. wsj.com/articles/antit…
Louis Brandeis thought antitrust should constrain bigness for its own sake; true democracy required a multitude of economic actors. This influenced antitrust law for decades. But in the 1970s Robert Bork attacked it...
... for ignoring how size brought efficiency which raised consumer welfare. Thereafter antitrust law has been largely viewed through the prism of consumer welfare. Two big forces are pushing the pendulum back. First, growing evidence of monopoly power (wide profit margins ...
... stagnant new biz formation) and second, a broader progressive backlash against classical microeconomics' emphasis on efficiency a.k.a. neoliberalism. Neo-Brandeisieans like @linakhanFTC and @superwuster want to return antitrust to its expansive early mission of preventing...
...concentrated economic & thus political power. But a drawback of this approach is that while consumer welfare can be approximated with economic tools... democracy, oligarchy, etc are much more subjective. Trump Admin's failed effort to halt merger of AT&T & CNN parent...
Time Warner, which some suspect was politically motivated, an example of risks that can arise when antitrust is applied to these more amorphous goals./end
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