OP-ED

Progressive Antitrust’s Agenda Is a Perverse Rx for a Nation in Debt

April 17, 2024

Wildflowers are blooming, the sun lingers, and President Joe Biden believes the recent jump in employment means his economy is showing green shoots of renewal. But the American people are not buying it. A recent CBS News poll reveals that 59 percent of Americans believe the state of the economy under Biden is bad.

Americans see an administration unconcerned over a Congressional Budget Office warning that the national debt is rising into unprecedented territory, 116 percent of U.S. GDP by 2034. The administration appears unconcerned about the long-term implications of a generation of schoolchildren stunted by the pandemic shutdown.

In the 2020 election, President Biden all but used the word “normalcy” when he promised to be our bridge to a new generation of leaders. Biden’s long Senate service made him ideally suited to deliver an era of good feelings in which the president would adopt policies in line with the more centrist Democratic tradition. But that has not been the approach taken by some of the regulators appointed by his administration. Instead, they have been pursuing a strikingly radical agenda.

Consider: In no domain is the United States more competitive than in the digital realm. Since the birth of the internet, our country has used this power to foster a global, open internet. Yet Biden’s U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, recently reversed this U.S. commitment. She echoed left-wing groups like the hard-left American Economic Liberties Project and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who argue that domestic regulation of Big Tech is thwarted by the robust presence of these Americans companies in world markets. Gone is the long-standing U.S. opposition to forced data localization and the mandatory transfers of intellectual property. Tai is giving her nod to a balkanized internet that will give despots the power to wrest source codes from U.S. tech companies to the detriment of America’s competitiveness and foreign democracy activists. Even Senator Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) called the move “a win for China, plain and simple.”

At home, the administration is using antitrust policy to wage war on the most successful U.S. tech companies. In the recent Department of Justice complaint against Apple, the government’s case rests on a claim that “as developers created more and better products, content, apps, and services, more people bought iPhones, which incentivized even more third parties to develop apps for the iPhone.” Yes, quality attracts consumers, which in turn attracts more innovation and investment. As former representative Mimi Walters wrote: “If success becomes an antitrust violation, then the government’s real target is not any specific company but the free market itself.”

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint against Amazon is equally illogical, accusing the company of matching the discounts of its rivals — which one would think antitrust policy would encourage — while somehow raising prices for consumers. In both the Apple and Amazon lawsuits, the government maintains that these companies should open the guts of their businesses to competitors, a novel idea not found in antitrust law or any business school. Google, also in the administration’s crosshairs, outcompeted Yahoo, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves to put almost all human knowledge at the fingertips of billions of people — for free. Now Google stands accused of harming consumers.

In each case, Biden’s progressive antitrust regulators do not rely on economic analysis or fact-based arguments. Their cases are rhetorical, not analytical, creating new markets as needed — consider DOJ’s creation of a “performance smartphones” market (a government neologism for fancy, more expensive smartphones) for the Apple suit. The FTC is similarly making a case against Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, for dominating a “personal social networking services” market that excludes YouTube, TikTok, iMessage, Mastodon, and others.

My father, the late Judge Robert Bork, foresaw such regulatory shenanigans. He wrote that the “capture of antitrust’s potent symbolism and educative power by the ideologies of statism and interventionism would be a major loss to the ideology underpinning a liberal, democratic, and capitalist social order.” Progressive regulators know that if they can wreck Big Tech, they can control businesses of all sorts.

Yet progressive antitrust has many cheerleaders, even among conservatives, smarting over Big Tech’s sometimes illiberal content moderation. At their core, progressives distrust Big Tech simply because it is capitalist and big. Neither group seems to care that these firms lead the world, employ millions of Americans, and maintain the pensions of countless retirees.

Moreover, love or hate our biggest and most competitive tech firms, we cannot afford such a regulatory cultural revolution at a time when America is following the trajectory of Italy and Japan into an era of high debt and slow growth, one that will be made even more painful by the damage the administration’s environmental policies will do to our energy and automotive sectors.

To escape the trap of debt and mediocrity, we should unleash the animal spirits of the economy, not repress them, for only hypergrowth can pull our economy forward. Such a strategy requires rational regulation that puts the interests of consumers and national competitiveness before ideology. There is still time to reverse course, but it will happen only if we are all clear about how much is at stake.

Originally published at the National Review.