Rand Paul's Audacious Antitrust Proposal
BY LOGAN ALBRIGHT
March 30, 2016
Antitrust law doesn’t get a lot of attention these days. People tend to take for granted that monopolies are bad, and that government needs to intervene in markets to prevent them, as well as any other behavior that could be considered anticompetitive or bad for consumers. Hence, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and various other agencies have been charged with enforcing antitrust laws without any serious scrutiny from the people.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), however, is not content to let the status quo go unchallenged. His new bill, entitled the Anti-Trust Freedom Act, would dismantle 125 years of antitrust law in a single paragraph, making all voluntary economic agreements between individuals or groups of individuals legal notwithstanding longstanding statutes like the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914.
The implications of such legislation would be huge. So much so that we probably can’t fully anticipate all of them. The question is, would the results be good for consumers and the economy, or bad? Conventional wisdom holds that antitrust laws prevent evil monopolists from abusing and exploiting consumers, but there are plenty of reasons to doubt that this is actually the case, and to suppose that, in fact, antitrust laws do more harm than good.
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