This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 7th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For a long time, antitrust enforcers placed consumer welfare

as the primary consideration for judging a business action.

And if that standard goes away, what replaces it?

Duke Economist Michael Munger and I discussed some of the difficulties of trying to replace the consumer welfare

standard in antitrust action. The difficulty is that the sort of

progressives that now have the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, their personnel occupy the Federal

Trade Commission and the Justice Department. They've become originalists. They have discovered

the original intent of the Sherman Act. and it turns out if you look at the content of a lot of the legislative debate

It's clear that the Sherman Act was passed to manipulate the industrial

structure for all sorts of a dog's breakfast of different purposes. So we want to

help labor, we want to help small competitors, we want to help farmers against these large railroads.

We want to help consumers.

But it turns out that if you have all those different goals, you don't really have any.

What you have is a

rent seeking contest and unsurprisingly a system that's designed to protect the

powerful will not protect the weak. Let's say they're correct and the Sherman

Act is meant to break up the big boys and punish

the big boys for bigness is that the is that the conclusion that you're big and therefore suspect the the primary problem. So contracts and restraint of trade, price fixing the attempt to use

mergers and acquisitions just for the sake of monopolizing a market. And the market has to be defined

in a specific enough way that there's entry's not possible

...