Category: Director’s Take
With Christine Wilson’s departure, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has lost a champion for high-quality work and open debate. Many will miss her, but the staff and consumers will suffer the most. What’s even sadder is that it seems that losing her as a commissioner was necessary to lay bare the FTC’s rapid decay. The [...]
The neo-Brandeisian (NB) movement has always been about using the government to control others. Its primary strategy is to use antitrust to limit what consumers and businesses can do, but the movement is also interested in using economic regulation, control of property rights, and public ownership of businesses to impose its will on the economy. [...]
Regulatory Washington has an appetite for irony, contradiction, and paradox. This is on full display as the Department of Justice (DOJ) seeks to grow online advertising while Congress takes up laws to counteract those efforts. The DOJ has joined several states in filing yet another antitrust case against Google. The new one is about online [...]
President Joe Biden wants to have your online cake and eat it too. His 2023 State of the Union address included numerous announcements of controls on industries and types of citizens. Each deserves to be critiqued, because a government-run economy becomes a failed economy. But I will limit my comments here to his plans for [...]
Smith’s insight that an economy’s purpose is to serve consumers seems self-evident—but not to today’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In three antitrust cases and a change in policy direction, the agency seems to be losing interest in consumers’ preferences. In the cases, the FTC appears to be decreasing its reliance on consumers’ choices in its [...]