The Federal Trade Commission, the Director of the Federal Trade Commission, the Commissioner's

Commissioner is Lena Khan, and that is a very well-educated and extremely forthright young

person who has a completely fresh understanding of the role of the FTC in the world of 21st

century capitalism. It is surprising the scale of this concept, and I welcome Varanik

to Rijia the Mercatus Center, writing most recently a creator syndicate, as to what Lena

Khan sees as her mission, her role at FTC, and how she wants to achieve it. Varanik

a very good evening to you. The chair, Lena Khan, looks to challenge the idea of merger

of combinations in American capitalism. Is there a single explanation as to why? Good

evening to you. Good evening, John. Well, yeah, I guess the simplest explanation for

this is that this administration and the FTC in particular led by the Nikon, they see

big, big corporation, big large market chairs as being a sign of badness. If you're big,

you're bad, you're necessarily exploiting your consumers, and so, and hurting competition,

that's pretty much what they believe. But what's interesting is you said it was a fresh

new approach, when in fact, it's an approach that dates back to at least 50 years, I mean,

prior to the change, where what the FTC is actually started to look at, rather than the

size of companies, is the impact that any particular merger or particular company had

on consumer welfare. So they talked about how big is bad, it's bad for competition,

and arguably for consumers, but they completely dropped any analysis that will actually look

at the impact of any merger on consumer welfare. Let's use examples here, you use Apple,

which is a big company, $3 trillion, depending on the price of the shares at that particular

day. That's big, but you give the example of how Apple acquired a small firm that led to

innovation and prosperity. Now, big is good if it leads to prosperity, and the other

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