Critique of Antitrust Laws

     The idea of having antitrust laws, and using them to abolish monopolies, is flawed.

     In my opinion, it would be foolish to trust a government monopoly to abolish a business monopoly, for the simple fact that monopolies enable each other. Businesses desirous of monopolies lobby the government for favors, and the same monopolistic state grants the businesses exclusive and exclusionary titles, properties, privileges, and licenses.

     However, the goal of abolishing monopolies should not be abandoned solely due to that fact. It is possible to abolish monopolies without growing the size and scope of government, and without spending more money, and even by doing nothing.

     To allow monopolies to be abolished passively rather than actively, government could simply allow people to go into competition with whatever monopolies are unnatural and problematic. As soon as someone becomes free to compete against a monopoly, the monopoly becomes de facto no longer a monopoly.

     This is because someone else is now trying to sell the same good or service; whereas the privilege (not the right) to compete against the monopolist was previously regulated and licensed-out by government. And the government, by the way, gets away with charging practically any price it pleases, on the permits and licenses which it grants, and which it grants itself the exclusive right to create, and from which, the exclusive right to profit.

     In an absence of monopolistic competition, subsidies and bailouts, and other taxpayer-funded privileges and protections that benefit business, the problem of monopoly would be on its way to being solved by consumers. That's because consumers would retain the absolute freedom to refuse to transact with firms they dislike; whether through face-to-face buying and selling, or through being taxed to support those businesses.

     No society which steals from productive workers, to balance the bills of those who house and employ them, can be called a society which values voluntary association (which includes freedom from association). Additionally, no society is voluntary which does not recognize that we have innumerable unalienable rights, which are enshrined in the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, among them the right to perform and exchange labor in order to survive.

     Although the Ninth Amendment was written on a piece of paper, it strongly suggests that our rights do not come from a piece of paper. And when a government can restrict our freedoms to travel, marry, work, trade, etc. - and demand that we pay them, and identify ourselves with government-issued identification papers whenever asked – that government does not respect the Ninth Amendment. It does not respect the notion that we have so many rights, it would be impossible to try to write all of them down, lest someone start suspecting that writing them down means that they are things that a majority can vote away.

     The way to establish free competition, and allow for easy and peaceful abolition of monopolies, is to respect our Ninth Amendment rights to work without a license, and to go into competition with powerful monopolies without paying the government for a permit. Such licenses and permits amount to unjustifiable entry fees; barriers to entry into the markets and into the labor force. These measures suppress not only competition, but also cooperation, which can be equally damaging to monopoly (as long as it does not succumb to “cooperation with authority”).

     What we have now is neither a wholly free-market system, nor capitalism, nor voluntary association, nor true competition. We have a rigged, regulated simulation of monopoly, which also attempts to include features of the free-market system – like enterprise – in that simulation. But this is neither true monopoly nor true competition; it is “monopolistic competition”, in which firms compete for the reward of having all the other players knocked off the board. Firms may try to compete all they want, but it's still rigged (so it's not a free market); and nonetheless, they're not disqualified for trying ( so it's not a full monopoly either).

     The result of the failure of antitrust is the same result as all government failure; moral hazard. This is the blind faith in government, and the unproven assumption that government oversight or intervention is actually making goods safer and more healthy. Think of it as sort of the “argument from benevolence” about the existence of God, but applied to the state instead; it's the assumption that if we can conceive of an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-benevolent government, then one must exist! But of course, this is a joke.

     The negative consequences of antitrust failure do not stop at moral hazard; they continue on, to regulatory capture; the success of businesses which have the legal and financial resources to avoid being burdened by new regulations (which has the effect of shutting their competitors out of business). If these negative consequences are allowed to continue, the results can include the overspecialization of tasks, the enforcement of professional regulations which is favorable to only those jobs and industries which are already well-established, and the hoarding of skills by older workers (to prevent new workers from “threatening their livelihoods” by competing against them for wages in the job market).

     All of this, of course, means higher prices for us; for any and all types of goods and services we could possibly want or imagine. The risks of antitrust should not be taken lightly.

Written and Published on August 9th, 2018