Let a Biden Reappraisal Include Antitrust

If any good comes from the administration’s debacles, our oldest president will put aside childish things.

By Holman Jenkins. Excerpts:

"In 2003, under the auspices of the Brookings Institution, economists Clifford Winston and Robert Crandall went looking for evidence that antitrust enforcement benefited the public. They found none. And there’s been no revolution since that would alter this conclusion. Think back to the Justice Department’s pointless attempt to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, which has since unraveled for its own reasons. The department’s case served to show only how a serious person, Trump appointee Makan Delrahim, can be reduced to saying inane things under the bureaucratic compulsions that drive antitrust today."

"If antitrust laws were written today, they would be written very differently. In the 1890s, never-before-seen forms of large industrial enterprise were first besmirching the American landscape; now we have businesses of all sizes. We have impossibly fecund capital markets spawning new business models to challenge every kind of incumbent. We have tort law, consumer regulation, labor regulation, environmental regulation.

Nothing lends itself to abuse, though, like antitrust’s treatment of every proposed merger as a potential violation, a power used routinely to monkey around with the private sector without accountability. Now Ms. Khan wants to apply this leverage to the economy wholesale. With a record number of deals happening, she has ordered the corporate universe to come to a halt. As her agency misses deadline after deadline for vetting transactions sometimes as small as $93 million, she threatens firms that if they proceed (as they are entitled to do) her agency may file lawsuits in coming years to unravel deals long after they’ve been integrated."

"Here she imbibes a short-lived literature claiming that oligopolies have been permitted to overtake our economy despite armies of state and federal trustbusters. In record time, this literature has been debunked by a corrective literature. Such arguments are shown to misconstrue the impact of new national and online business models, which have meant that Americans at the end of any country road now have more of the world’s cornucopia at their fingertips than a Manhattanite did two decades ago."