Restoring Anti-monopoly Through Bright-Line Rules

Today, extreme corporate concentration is the rule across a great variety of industries, from health care to agriculture to communications. This concentration of power poses numerous threats to the economic wellbeing of Americans, as monopolists drive down wages, jack up prices, and reduce quality and supply. Of even greater concern, this concentration poses grave threats to American democracy as these powers capture ever more control over media and communications platforms and markets, and over the government itself. 

In establishing America’s antimonopoly system, the founders and Congress sought to protect us, as both citizens and economic actors, from dangerous concentrations of wealth, power, and control. For two centuries, they used simple rules—including common carriage, bans on vertical integration in banking and railroads, and programs to promote the wide dispersion of land—to limit the size, structure, behavior, and reach of corporations and to protect our democracy and our most basic liberties. But a generation ago, the executive branch and the courts began to adopt a radically different set of goals and methods. As a result, enforcers today typically decide the merits of any particular merger or corporate practice based on studies by neoclassical economists of the theoretical “efficiency” of some particular merger or business practice.

It is now overwhelmingly clear that this vague, highly subjective, and easily manipulated standard is a main, if not the main, source of the extreme and dangerous concentrations of power Americans face throughout the nation’s political economy.

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