The FTC should have shucked the Biden antitrust playbook. It kept it instead.
Instead of bringing needed change, the Trump antitrust agenda doubled down on failed policies.
The second Trump administration’s continuation of Biden-era progressive antitrust enforcement has been an unwelcome surprise.
Some of these antitrust cases originated in the first Trump administration but were embellished as they were advanced by Lina Khan, Biden’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission. In one case, Trump enforcers continued to use Khan’s amended complaint that said Meta had an 85 percent monopoly on consumers’ time spent on the “personal social networking” market. U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg dismissed the government’s case, noting that regulators had ignored new competitors to Meta such as TikTok and YouTube to bolster their claim that a monopoly existed.
The administration’s rhetoric is not much better. Vice President JD Vance recently called for a shift from Milton Friedman’s defense of free-market capitalism to a Hamiltonian focus on big-government projects, adding that the aim of government policy should be to make the economy “a tool to service the dignity of the human person.” Trump’s FTC chair, Andrew Ferguson, said government intervention is necessary “to restrict the exercise of liberty when that exercise of liberty meaningfully diminishes other people’s flourishing.”
References to “flourishing” over freedom are scattered throughout the speeches of Ferguson and his colleague, FTC member Mark Meador. Now Trump regulators are picking up yet another progressive trope: blaming businesses for inflation.
That approach echoes President Joe Biden’s 2021 announcement of 72 antitrust initiatives, which attributed stagnant wages and inflation to capitalist greed rather than excessive government regulation or debt levels exceeding those at the end of World War II.
So, when inflation increased food prices, Khan dutifully led an FTC strike force to probe grocers. When gasoline prices rose, she told the oil and gas industry that it was under the government’s microscope.
Not to be outdone by their progressive predecessors, the Trump Justice Department and 17 state attorneys general recently filed an antitrust lawsuit against egg producers after a price spike last year. The companies recently agreed to a $3.3 million settlement and promised to donate 53 million eggs to food banks and nonprofits, but did not admit to wrongdoing.
The department also called on state attorneys general to “use all tools available” under state law to investigate oil companies that, according to Trump’s public statements, did not drop their prices fast enough after the short-lived ceasefire with Iran took effect.
And just before the Fourth of July weekend, the Agriculture Department pressured grocers to lower beef prices.
If evidence emerges that companies secretly conspired to fix prices, they should be prosecuted. Price-fixing is one of the oldest and clearest violations of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. It is theft by another name.
But an equally important principle is often lost in today’s political climate: High prices are not, by themselves, evidence of price-fixing. Sometimes they are simply due to the power of nature.
Egg prices, for instance, jumped last year after millions of egg-layinghens died or were culled in the bird flu epidemic. Today, egg prices are down about 43 percent from a year ago.
Beef prices are the clear result of America’s persistent drought. With the national inventory of cattle and calves at its lowest level in more than 75 years, it is no surprise that costs increased. Gas prices have been volatiledue to global oil supply disruptions caused by the conflict between the U.S. and Iran.
Unless secret agreements are unearthed between the producers of these goods, the Trump administration’s actions are a continuation of the Biden antitrust playbook that blames capitalism for the consequences of nature and policy.
A Republican administration adopting the Democrats’ hostility to business is a sea change in American politics.
Both parties now blame the market economy for high prices, even as companies are subject to extensive regulations. Worse, these accusations hide the real causes of dysfunction in American society. Those include unprecedented levels of debt, the perverse effects of overregulation and a public school system in which American students grossly underperform their peers in other developed countries.
Bashing business is no doubt cathartic, and it is certainly good politics. But it is not, as Vice President Vance says, a way to serve the dignity of the human person.
This article first appeared in the Washington Post.