Antimonopoly

As Americans struggle with an increasing cost of living, a new poll suggests that the public prefers leaders who create prosperity by taking on concentrated corporate power over those who focus on removing government barriers. Jennifer Howard argues that this reflects a growing recognition that corporations block abundance because they profit from artificial scarcity. She describes how businesses consolidate and then engineer limits to extract wealth. She writes that to achieve shared abundance we have to confront corporate power.

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.

Tim Brennan finds the new shift in antitrust thought and enforcement connected to the Neo-Brandeisian movement to be flawed for the most part. However, he writes that a reinvigorated focus on tacit collusion, which some have blamed on the rise of prices for groceries and apartment rents, may deserve consideration and further study.

Steven C. Salop writes that the Biden administration oversaw a paradigm shift in antitrust, but it was the full adoption of the ideas of the Post-Chicago school, whose intellectual influence has countered Chicago since the 1980s, rather than the empowerment of the Anti-Monopoly or Neo-Brandeisian school of thought. This latter school of thought played an important role by motivating increased enforcement and corralling political support, even if it did not lead to cases that could not have been brought by Post-Chicagoans.

Daniel Francis reviews the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of the Biden administration’s antitrust work, and argues that these two projects have been in deep tension. He concludes that the administration’s evolutionary work within the welfarist paradigm has generated some important successes, but that the revolutionary effort to restore a pre-welfarist vision of antitrust has failed on its own terms — and, in failing, has left welfarism all the stronger.

Eleanor Fox writes that the paradigm shift in United States antitrust is not best understood as an embrace of neo-Brandeisian anti-bigness ideas but rather a rejection of neoliberal principles that have prevented effective antitrust regulation for decades. The shift encompasses the concerns and efforts of centrists, progressives, and neo-Brandeisians.

John W. Mayo reviews whether or not the articulated principles and priorities of the Neo-Brandeisian movement in antitrust scholarship and enforcement represent a “paradigm shift,” per the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn. Mayo finds that the Neo-Brandeisian discourse is best understood as situated within the continuum of the current antitrust paradigm, and that many of its efforts to substantiate its distinctive ideas have failed to properly ground them in empiricism or repudiate existing studies.

Alden Abbott, former general counsel of the FTC, argues that, contrary to claims made in a recent ProMarket article, American competition is vibrant and robust....

In her new book Antitrust, Senator Amy Klobuchar explains the origins of US antitrust law, diagnoses how the nation got derailed from the legislative...

How will US antitrust policy look under President Joe Biden? We caught up with four antitrust experts—Jonathan Baker, Zephyr Teachout, William Kovacic, and Teddy...