Will a Trump-Vance Administration Double Down on Progressive Antitrust?

July 15, 2024

Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate – and now, likely Vice President – has a heroic, almost Teddy Roosevelt aspect to it. After Trump himself gamely survived an assassination attempt in the T.R. mold, he selected a man whose rise through military, academic and literary fame is almost as meteoric as that of the original Rough Rider.

A word of caution, however. At a time when Republicans purport to stand against everything “progressive,” we should remember that T.R. was the original progressive president. While antitrust action against the big trusts of his day was undoubtedly necessary, T.R. was notoriously hungry to expand the reach and power of government over the private sector.

That tradition lives on in the hands of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who labors to expand regulators’ antitrust power beyond the traditional consumer welfare standard to a range of amorphous goals. Her FTC wants the government to intervene to protect less efficient competitors, labor unions, and even – somehow – to address racial disparities. Antitrust enforcement is ill-equipped to deal with these priorities. Such an approach would create such a broad array of vague infractions that any executive and any business could be hauled up at a moment’s notice for … something. This would give politicians and regulators the ability to keep companies – and their political donations and speech – under their thumb.

Like many Republicans, Sen. J.D. Vance is rightly upset about the occasional deposting and sometimes outright censorship of conservative voices by Big Tech social media. But Republicans today need wisdom and perspective that the Bull Moose incarnation of T.R. was lacking – the ability to see the unintended consequences of hyperaggressive federal antitrust. More than once my father, Judge Robert Bork, cautioned that in the wrong hands, antitrust could become the midwife of socialism.

On this score, Sen. Vance could use a little more perspective. He said that far from being “engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing,” as some Republicans portray her, Chair Khan is one of the few Biden Administration appointees “who is doing a pretty good job.”

And she is. Chair Khan is doing a good job of distorting the law beyond its statutory and constitutional limits to create a degree of government control that amounts to a socialist economy. We look forward to engaging with the Trump-Vance campaign to expose these leaders to the pitfalls of progressive antitrust. If Republicans follow up on Khan’s record with more of the same progressive antirust policies we will have, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, socialism in our time.