It’s not often that Republicans support the agenda of the leftist sense. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But it’s happening.
Senator Josh Hawley, a newborn Republican senator from Missouri, introduced a bill in Congress titled: “The Confidence Buster for the 21st Century Bill.” This could be the most threatening Republican bill in centuries for our economy. It would reduce American competitiveness, cost millions of jobs, penalize companies for growing and achieving profitability, defund compact business startups and give unprecedented fresh regulatory powers to lawyers and deep state bureaucrats in Washington.
Hawley is not a fan of Big Tech politics – who is? – that’s why he wants to put fresh teeth into the antitrust laws that were born during America’s first “era of progress.” His bill would 1) prohibit mergers and acquisitions of companies with a market capitalization of more than $100 billion; 2) change the standard of “monopolistic” behavior from causing “consumer harm” to one that emphasizes “competition protection”; and 3) significantly expand the authority of federal regulatory agencies to restrict domestic high-tech companies.
Hawley, who has a background as a lawyer, defends his bill, saying, “This country and this government should not be run by a few megacorporations.” The Republican Party “must once again become a trust-busting party.”
Yes. That’s like saying we should bring back smallpox.
Trustbusting is based on a century-old leftist fable about America being taken over by predatory “robber barons.” Economist Burt Folsom debunked these progressive lies in his classic book “The Myth of The Robber Barons,” which shows conclusively that J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller were not villains who raped . consumers with their monopolistic behavior and “stockpiles of wealth”. They were captains of entirely fresh, life-changing industries. The left disparaged the prosperity of the “Gilded Age,” when these titans of industry helped transform America into the unrivaled industrial superpower it became in the 20th century. They were heroes who built or delivered railroads, steel and aluminum, our current financial system, oil and gas, and the automotive industry, to name just a few.
Monopolies were supposedly bad because they used their market power and dominance to cheat consumers with ever-increasing prices. But then, as now, in every industry supposedly controlled by monopolies, prices plummeted; energy, transportation, financial services, cars, and mass-market goods became affordable to the middle class for the first time in world history.
Now Hawley is echoing liberal Democrats in claiming that America’s total domination of trillion-dollar high-tech industries – Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the like – “has not been a success for consumers.” Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin – villains.
Really? In our lifetime, cell phone prices have dropped by 95%; the cost of the Internet decreased by 98%; online transaction costs have dropped by over 80%. Globalization has lifted over a billion people out of poverty. How do these companies “deceive” consumers? A cell phone 30 years ago would have been bulky and costly; a cell phone today costs $300 from Apple and has 100 times more capabilities and computing power. This is the biggest deal ever, except for Google Search, which is free.
I am not defending the behavior of companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google that discriminate against conservatives through their business practices and political interventions. In too many cases, these companies have silenced conservative opinions and voices. But as Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio notes, “antitrust laws are not the appropriate remedy for political attacks on free speech.”
No free enterprise advocate should ever invoke the Sherman-Clayton antitrust laws to expand the size and scope of government and crush entrepreneurs whose “crime” is building better mousetraps at lower cost. That’s what capitalism is all about. America has dominated the tech world and kept China, Japan, and the European Union at bay—all of whom want to displace us as the world’s dominant power. Break up Apple, Google, or Amazon, and the large winner will be Beijing, which will want to win the race for AI, robotics, and 5G.
All Republicans should reject the return of progressive antitrust attacks on our free market system. If Hawley wants to break up monopolies, his efforts could be much better spent breaking up the government school monopoly.
Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economic consultant at FreedomWorks. He is co-author of the book “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive the American Economy.”
