The modern antitrust movement, sometimes called the neo-Brandeisians after the former Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis, had a major influence on the Biden administration. Now that Donald Trump has returned to power, what’s next?
Over at the new publication The Argument, Matt Bruenig has a critical review of what he calls the urtext of the modern antitrust movement, Cornered by Barry Lynn. I agree with some of Bruenig’s points, but not others. More fundamentally, I believe there must be a role for antitrust for any brand of socialism that includes markets.
I share Bruenig’s critique about Lynn’s Jeffersonian version of freedom. Being able to start your own business is not all that liberating. I have some personal experience with that kind of work; I did not like it. You experience both the market pressure of having to get up every day and work to make a living, and also the highly obnoxious paperwork required to interface with the various bureaucracies for taxation, unemployment, accounting, and so on. I much prefer being a cog in a larger organization.
That said, some people will always want to try their hand at running their own business—like small-business owner Matt Bruenig, in fact—and I see no problem with enabling that possibility. Keeping markets competitive enough that a newcomer could theoretically make headway is a decent benchmark to aim at.
Bruenig argues that one political advantage of antitrust is it avoids “contentious policy levers like public ownership, tax and spending hikes, and union promotion.” There may be something to this point insofar as it concerns antitrust’s appeal to Democrats—who do rely on a lot of big-money donors—but antitrust is plenty contentious. We saw Biden’s antitrust policies drive corporate elites into a foaming-at-the-mouth rage. Both Wall Street and Big Tech absolutely loathe former FTC Chair Lina Khan. During her term at the FTC, The Wall Street Journal editorial board, the beating heart of capitalism, published a negative editorial about her once every ten days on average.
The reasons for this seething hatred are obvious. Corporate CEOs fight union drives hammer and tongs because they are enraged at the idea of their workers having any say in how the company is run; they fought Khan for the same reason. They did not want meddling bureaucrats telling them not to secure dominant market positions so they can abuse workers and customers—and antitrust remedies can potentially be quite aggressive, like when John D. Rockefeller’s giant oil monopoly was broken into bits.
Publicly generated competition has been a reliable policy solution that neo-Brandeisians return to over and over again.
That leads to the first socialist argument for antitrust—that it disperses power. Owners of major corporate conglomerates, like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Ellison, are so rich that they have major political power—arguably more than all but a handful of elected officials. Now, a fully socialist economy would not have any significant private ownership of wealth, but a deconcentrated corporate sector is still moving in the right direction.
A more important issue is the functioning of markets. Half the point of antitrust is to ensure that businesses compete in the market based on quality and price, not by trying to obtain market power, or cheating the customer somehow. That’s why the Federal Trade Commission Act prohibits “unfair methods of competition” and “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” and why Biden’s FTC spent so much time doing stuff like banning noncompete employment contracts or creating a right to repair your possessions. It’s also why a democratic socialist like Zohran Mamdani—mentioned favorably by Bruenig—enthusiastically welcomes the support of Lina Khan.
It is quite difficult to make markets behave in a prosocial fashion. As we can see all around us today—from crypto scams, to fake or counterfeit goods being sold online, to abusive microtransaction-laden mobile games, to gambling apps—cheating and lying require much, much less toil than building a quality product or service.
If our socialist utopia still has some kind of market, those dangers are still going to exist. It will probably be less likely that a worker- or state-owned company will try to boost sales by buying out all their competitors, running dishonest advertising, forcing people to sign slanted purchase contracts, or other abusive tactics, but it still could happen. It will still be a good idea to have an FTC around, just in case.
More important still for socialism, competition can unleash serious energy, if the circumstances are right. China, for instance, has driven staggering progress in solar, battery, and EV technology by deliberately funding several different companies with subsidized loans and forcing them to fight each other like cats in a sack. Contrast that with America’s sole airline manufacturer, the lumbering behemoth Boeing, last seen trying to keep all of its parts on the plane during flight.
China’s success has created a problem of supposed overproduction in both solar and EVs, but that comes down largely to China’s low-consumption growth model. A lot more of these products would be sold if Chinese people had more income to buy them—and in any case, as Bill McKibben argues, it is crazy to be slowing down solar and EV production at a time when we need to be deploying them as fast as possible, all over the world.
Indeed, we could call this a more muscular, socialism-inflected version of antitrust. Rather than (or in addition to) playing constant legal whack-a-mole against market concentration, the government steps in directly and creates the competition it wants, either through subsidies or outright state-owned firms. This antitrust model has led to by far the most effective attack on fossil fuel power in history: the rise of ultra-cheap renewable energy.
Publicly generated competition (along with public utility regulation) has been a reliable policy solution that neo-Brandeisians return to over and over again. One of the more prominent anti-monopoly think tanks, the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, literally has a “Project on Public Options,” and its researchers have endorsed ideas like postal banking, public groceries, public cloud infrastructure, public artificial intelligence, social housing, and more, as a means to spur competition with dominant incumbent firms. Yardstick competition, where a state-run entity provides a benchmark for pricing and service quality, has been a hallmark of anti-monopoly thinking going back to the Tennessee Valley Authority and beyond.
None of this takes away from the need to build a proper American welfare state or take collective control of the national wealth. But markets will be a useful technology for the foreseeable future, so long as they are carefully controlled.
