In the wake of Democrats’ losses in 2024, progressives should focus on how antitrust can support a lower cost of living and increase consumer access to essential goods and services, writes Diana Moss.
Antitrust has not escaped the chaos rendered by the 2024 presidential election. The Neo-Brandeisian “anti-monopolists” that led the Biden antitrust agencies are out and the “MAGA antitrusters” are in. While it is not yet clear how this toggle from far-left to far-right populist ideology will redefine antitrust, Democrats who recognize its intrinsic value in promoting consumer, worker, and entrepreneurial freedom in a market economy have an important task. That is, to shape an antitrust agenda for combatting high prices that drive up the cost of living and expanding access to essential goods and services.
Antitrust enforcement is famously agnostic in promoting competition across the economy. But as working voters who broke for the GOP in 2024 made clear, they care most about where the bulk of their consumer dollars go: food, healthcare, housing, insurance and retirement, and transportation. Many of the markets that make up these massive sectors, however, lack robust competition while antitrust enforcement lags behind. They are also particularly hard-hit by Trump tariff polices. Moreover, price increases have exceeded average rates of inflation, further driving up the cost of living.
As revelations about the failure of Biden economic policy continue to unfurl, new issues are moving to the center of the radar. The so-called “abundance” agenda in one. Abundance focuses on improving access to essential goods and services. This includes lowering administrative hurdles to creating infrastructure to support expanded housing, transportation, and energy resources. Abundance also seeks to reduce burdens on the innovation system that constrain research & development, financing, and commercialization for new technologies and products.
Anti-monopoly progressives are leery of abundance, presumably because it invokes the bogeyman of “bigness” in that, to some degree, scale and scope may be part of creating needed infrastructure. An emphasis on lessening restrictions to spur supply-side solutions, in service of expanding access to essential goods and services, therefore, is at odds with the anti-monopoly agenda. One anti-monopoly advocate asked, in fact, whether there is “room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics.”
Among other things, the abundance debate shines a strong light on differences between how center-left progressives that support vigorous antitrust enforcement and far-left anti-monopolists view the role of antitrust. For anti-monopolists, antitrust is a major policy tool for fixing a broad array of economic, social, and political problems that originate with corporate power. These include inequities in the distribution of wealth, loss of worker bargaining power, and erosion of democracy. Over the course of the Biden administration, however, it became clear that the current incarnation of antitrust cannot support this vision without major legislative surgery and swapping out the consumer welfare standard for bright-line tests for “bigness.” No Congress in the foreseeable future is likely to take up such reforms.
The anti-monopoly movement has largely eschewed cooperation or collaboration with center-left progressives. This is no mystery. The center-left views antitrust, not as a broad policy tool, but as “law enforcement,” or as “referee” on the playing field of markets. To that end, antitrust is designed to detect and deter consolidation and business practices that reduce competition and harm market participants through higher prices, lower wages, lower quality, and less innovation. To be sure, in promoting competition antitrust supports broader goals like equitable rebalancing and redistribution, but it is not intended to directly achieve these outcomes.
A major difference between center-left and anti-monopoly antitrust ideology is the former’s willingness to recognize the potential compatibility of strong antitrust enforcement with abundance. Experts outside antitrust agree, as one recently noted in response to an anti-monopoly critique of abundance: “One would have thought that antitrust-interested reviewers would have seen allies, rather than heretics.” To understand why this is true, we need to focus the “anti-monopoly-abundance” debate on important realities and details.
First, and at the most basic level, antitrust targets a fundamental problem that supports expanded access to essential goods and services. Harmful mergers or businesses practices act to restrict output in a market. Output restrictions push up prices to consumers and lower wages to workers. Moreover, persistent harmful consolidation and anticompetitive conduct begets even higher concentration that raises barriers to entry by smaller, disruptive players. Antitrust enforcement is designed to prevent harmful output restrictions and their impact on limiting access. In doing so, it bootstraps abundance. Anti-monopolists, who consider economics to be more of a liability than an asset, seem not to recognize this fundamental economic reality.
A second reality is that antitrust can support abundance as a useful means of achieving broad-based prosperity, but not when policymakers steer the movement along “ideological” lines. Indeed, Abundance co-author Ezra Klein noted anti-monopolists’ “tendency to be ‘monomaniacal’.” But as center-left progressives know, antitrust is not just about breaking up monopolies, as the swath of cases against the large tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple might lead ordinary observers to presume. Rather, antitrust is empowered also to police mergers and collusive agreements to fix prices or divide up markets.
To be clear, given unlimited resources, the government could pursue monopolies, mergers, and cartels simultaneously, and with abandon. But the reality is that the three priorities are often in competition for resources and enforcers must make tough choices without forsaking any one of them. To do so would fail to serve antitrust’s mission of protecting markets and the economy more broadly. Given the far left’s narrow focus on battling monopolies in the Big Tech arena, however, it is not surprising that other areas of enforcement may have gotten short shrift, exacerbating the difficult balancing act of allocating limited antitrust resources.
Antitrust enforcement against anticompetitive agreements is a good case and point. For example, many in the antitrust community have worried that the big-ticket monopoly cases were balkanizing the resources available to fight conspiracies. But we did not know the potential scope until the closing days of the Biden administration when newly released statistics made the issue plain. For example, with the exception of the Obama administration, the number of criminal cartel cases filed by the government since the turn of the century has trended down. During the Biden administration, case filings fell by about 50%, as compared to the average since 2000, and the backlog of pending cases grew by more than a third. These are the largest changes of any administration from 2000-2024.
A major reason for the deterioration in cartel enforcement is the waning effectiveness of the government’s “leniency” system for detecting cartels, which induces cartelists to self-report to the government in exchange for a lesser punishment. The leniency program netted sizable wins against cartels over the years and dismantled large conspiracies that raised prices, for example, for vitamins, graphite electrodes used for making steel, and marine construction projects. But the effectiveness of the leniency program has tailed off because, among other reasons, the threat of fines in other jurisdictions and damages in private antitrust actions de-incentivize self-reporting.
To be clear, a system that induces flipping on co-conspirators increases cartel detection rates and prevents output-restricting agreements that work against abundance. Despite the vital importance of cartel enforcement to consumers, Biden enforcers did not prioritize fixing the leniency program or finding new ways to bring anticompetitive agreements to light. In fact, the data show that things went even further south. To make matters worse, the Trump Department of Justice has proposed closing the DOJ Antitrust Division’s field offices that handle prosecuting agricultural cartels that have a direct impact on food prices.
The critical role of antitrust in promoting competition should unite those in the abundance community and those that are critical of it. If, as everyone seems to agree, we face a crisis of economic inequities in America, we need to restore antitrust’s capacity to be one of the most potent tools in the progressive toolbox. The high cost of living was a huge contributor to Democrats’ losses in 2024. Antitrust enforcement that is focused on consumers will demonstrate to voters that the government has the tools—and the will to use them—to keep prices and their cost of living down and to promote the freedom to choose that is central to a healthy market economy.
Author’s Disclosure: Diana Moss works for the Progressive Policy Institute. PPI is supported by corporations, individuals, and foundations such as the Lumina Foundation, Peterson Foundation, and Arnold Foundation. No funding source influenced the arguments expressed in this article or stands to benefit from them.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
