Archives For Chicago School

Political Philosophy, Competition, and Competition Law: The Road to and from Neoliberalism, Part 3

Lazar Radic —  10 October 2022

This post is the third in a three-part series. The first installment can be found here and the second can be found here.

As it has before in its history, liberalism again finds itself at an existential crossroads, with liberally oriented reformers generally falling into two camps: those who seek to subordinate markets to some higher vision of the common good and those for whom the market itself is the common good. The former seek to rein in, temper, order, and discipline unfettered markets, while the latter strive to build on the foundations of classical liberalism to perfect market logic, rather than to subvert it.

This conflict of visions has deep ramifications for today’s economic policy. In his classic text “The Antitrust Paradox,” Judge Robert Bork deemed antitrust law a “subcategory of ideology” that “connects with the central political and social concerns of our time.” Among these concerns, he focused specifically on the eternal tension between the ideals of “equality” and “freedom.” In recent years, that tension has been exemplified in competition-policy debates by two schools of thought: the neo-Brandeisians, whose jurisprudential philosophy draws from the progressive U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and another group represented by the Chicago School and other defenders of the consumer-welfare standard.

But this schism resembles similar divides that have played out countless times over the history of liberalism, albeit under different names and banners. Looking back on the past century and a half of economic and philosophical thought can help us to make sense of these fundamentally opposed visions for the future of both liberalism and antitrust. This history can also help us to understand how these ideologies have sometimes failed to live up to their ambitions or crumbled under the weight of their own contradictions. 

In this final piece in the political philosophy series, I explain the genesis, normative underpinnings, and likely outcome of the current “battle for the soul of antitrust.” The broader point that I have tried to make throughout this series is that this confrontation hinges on ethical and deontological considerations, as much as it does on “hard” consequentialist arguments. Put differently, how we decide to resolve foundational and putatively “technical” questions regarding the goals, standards, and enforcement of antitrust law ultimately cannot help but reflect our underlying views about the values and ideals that should guide a liberal society. In this vein, I argue that there are compelling non-utilitarian reasons to prefer a polity with an in-built bias for negative freedom and that is guided by a narrow economic-efficiency criterion, rather than the apparently ascendant alternatives.

The Birth of Neoliberalism

The clearest articulation of the philosophical schism between the two visions of liberalism that we see today came with the 1937 publication of “The Good Society” by American author and journalist Walter Lippmann. Lippman—who, like Brandeis, came out of the American Progressive Movement and had been an adviser to progressive U.S. President Woodrow Wilson—sparked the birth of “neoliberalism” as a separate strand of liberal political philosophical thought. The book invited readers to critically reexamine and, where appropriate, update the tenets of classical liberalism with a view toward “stabilizing and consolidating the course of an intellectual tradition that was otherwise bound to tumble straight into oblivion” (see here).  

This was the objective of the “neoliberal collective,” a loose affiliation of liberally oriented thinkers who convened for the first time at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938 to discuss Lippmann’s seminal book, and from 1947 onwards more formally under the auspices of the Mont Pelerin Society. 

Neoliberals grappled with questions that went to the very heart of liberalism, such as how to adapt traditional small-scale human societies to the exigencies of ever-widening markets and economic progress; the causes and consequences of industrial concentration; the appropriate role and boundaries of state intervention; the ability of markets to address the “social question”; the interplay between freedom and coercion; and the tension between the individual and the collective. Like Lippmann, the neoliberals were convinced that the failure to reckon with such fundamental issues would result in the inevitable displacement of liberalism by some form of “authoritarian collectivism,” which they believed provided emotionally appealing (but ultimately illusory) solutions to the full range of liberal problems.

It quickly became apparent, however, that there existed two main currents of neoliberalism.

The first, which I will call “left neoliberalism,” was a relatively conciliatory version that sought to strike a “mostly liberal” balance with socialism and collectivism. It postulated that markets are embedded in a broader social and political context that may include a strong and activist state, aggressive antitrust policy, robust social rights, and an emphasis on positive freedom. In this respect, their views resembled those of the Progressive Movement of Wilson and Brandeis, which was carried on into the mid-20th century in the United States by such figures as President Franklin Roosevelt, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, and economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The “left neoliberals,” however, were primarily European, and included the likes of Wilhelm Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Bohm, Alexander Rüstow, Luigi Einaudi, Louis Rougier, Louis Marlio, and Jacques Rueff (and, arguably, Lippmann himself). 

Adherents to the other strand, “right neoliberalism,” were more conservative and less willing to compromise. They championed a strong but minimal state tasked with (and limited by) facilitating efficient markets, posited a lean antitrust policy, and emphasized negative liberty. Thinkers like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Lionel Robbins, James Buchanan and, arguably, the more libertarian Ludwig von Mises and Bruno Leoni would fall into this group.

The Price Mechanism and the State

The two groups of neoliberals shared several basic postulates. 

First and foremost, they agreed that any revision of Adam Smith’’s “invisible hand” had to respect the integrity of the price mechanism (what Wilhelm Röpke referred to as the “sacrosanct core of liberalism”). The argument rested on utilitarian, but also political and ethical grounds. As Friedrich Hayek argued in “The Road to Serfdom,” the substitution of the free market for a centrally planned economy would lead to the loss of economic freedom, and eventually all other freedoms, as well. This meant that neoliberals were, on principle, harsh critics of any type of state intervention that distorted the formation of prices through the forces of supply and demand.

At the same time, however, neither strand of neoliberalism professed a doctrine of statelessness.  To the contrary, the state may, in hindsight, be neoliberalism’s greatest conquest. The question at hand is what kind of state is optimal. 

For the left neoliberals, a strong state was needed to resist capture by interest groups. It also had to exercise good political leadership and discretion in juggling goals and values (markets, after all, had to be “embedded” in the social order). These views were underpinned by a relatively sanguine set of expectations the left neoliberals had of the state’s willingness and capacity to protect the general interest, as well as their shared belief that the core institutions of liberalism (including self-regulating markets) were prone to degeneration and in need of constant public oversight. The state, not the private sector, was the ultimate ordering power of the economy. As Alexander Rüstow said:

I am, indeed, of the opinion that it is not the economy, but the state which determines our fate. 

The right neoliberal position was more ambivalent, due to its heightened skepticism toward state power. The bigger threat to freedom was not unfettered private power, but public power. As Milton Friedman put it in “Capitalism and Freedom”:

Government is necessary to preserve our freedom […] yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. […] How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat to freedom? 

The answer was a revamped Smithian nightwatchman that acted more as an umpire determining “the rules of the game” and overseeing free interactions between individuals than as a helmsman tasked with channeling society toward any particular variety of teleological goals. Like the left neoliberal position, this one, too, rests on a set of theoretical underpinnings.

One is that public actors are not any less self-interested than private ones, with the corollary that any extension or deepening of the powers of the state must be well-justified. The idea relied heavily on the public choice theory developed by James M. Buchanan, a member of Mont Pelerin Society and its president from 1984 to 1986. Thus, left and right neoliberals advanced almost completely opposite responses to the problem of capture. While left neoliberals believed in strengthening the state relative to private enterprise, the right’s critique led them to want precisely to limit state power and reshape institutional incentives.

This is not surprising, as right neoliberals were also more optimistic about the potential of markets and deontologically more preoccupied with negative freedom, a combination that added another layer of suspicion to any putatively progressive measures that involved wealth redistribution or meticulous administration of the market by the state.

Economic Concentration and Competition

Another important difference lay in the two sides’ views on economic concentration and competition. Some left neoliberals, particularly in Europe, internalized much of the Marxist and fascist critiques of capitalism, including the belief that markets naturally tended toward economic concentration. They argued, however, that this process could be reversed or prevented with robust antitrust and de-concentration measures. While essentially conceding Marxian arguments about the intrinsic tendency of competition to degenerate into monopoly—thereby fostering inequality and “proletarizing” the masses—they denied the ultimate implications upon which Marx had insisted—i.e., the inevitable “cannibalization” of capitalism through its inherent contradictions.

Right neoliberals, by contrast, insisted that, where economic concentration was not fleeting, it was generally the result of state action, not state inaction. As Mises argued, cartels were a consequence of protectionism and the artificial partitioning of markets through, e.g., tariffs. Similarly, monopolies formed and persisted because of “anti-liberal policies of governments that [created] the conditions favorable” to them. This implied that antitrust had a secondary position in securing competitive markets.

Each strand’s reasoning as to why competition was worthy of protection also differed. For the right neoliberals, who saw the legitimate goals and boundaries of public policy through the lenses of economic efficiency and negative freedom, the case for competition was principally a utilitarian one. As Hayek wrote in “Individualism and Economic Order,” state-backed institutions and laws (including antitrust laws) that “made competition work” (by which he meant, made competition work effectively) were one of the ways in which right neoliberals improved on the classical liberal position. 

Left neoliberals added political, social, and ethical layers to this argument. Politically, they shared the standard Marxian view that concentrated markets facilitated the capture of the state by powerful private interests. Marxists had, e.g., always asserted that Nazism was the product of “monopoly capitalism” and that the Nazis themselves were the tools of big business (the idea of “state monopoly capitalism” stems from Lenin). Left neoliberals largely agreed with this view. They also counseled that a centralized industry was more readily prone to takeover by an authoritarian state. In addition, they rejected “bigness” because they considered it an unnatural perversion of human nature (though such critiques surprisingly did not seem to translate to the state). As Wilhelm Röpke notes in “A Humane Economy”:

Nothing is more detrimental to a sound general order appropriate to human nature than two things: mass and concentration.

“Bigness,” Roepke thought, had come about as a result of one particularly harmful but pervasive trend of modernity: “economism,” a frequent target of left neoliberals that refers to a fixation with indicators of economic performance at the expense of deeper social and spiritual values.

But it would be a mistake to conclude that left neoliberals viewed competition as a panacea. Private property, profit, and competition (the foundations of liberalism) were as socially corrosive as they were beneficial. They were, according to Wilhelm Röpke:

justifiable only within certain limits, and in remembering this we return to the realm beyond supply and demand. In other words, the market economy is not everything. It must find its place within a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition.

Competition, in other words, was as Luigi Einaudi put it, a paradox. It was beneficial, but could also be socially and morally ruinous. 

The Goals and Boundaries of Public Policy

The perceived failures of liberalism guided the contrasting notions of what a reformed neoliberalism should look like. On the one hand, European left neoliberals and American progressives thought that liberalism suffered from certain inherent deficiencies that could not be resolved within the liberal paradigm and that called for mitigating policies and social-safety nets. Again, these resonated with familiar criticisms levied by the right and the left, such as, e.g., excessive individualism; the loss of shared values and a sense of community; a lack of “social integration”; worker alienation (in an essay titled “Social Policy or Vitalpolitik (Organic Policy),” Alexander Rüstow starts by citing Friedrich Engels’ 1945 “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”); and the socially explosive elements of competition and markets. These spiritual dislocations arguably weighed more than any material or economic shortcomings, and were at the root of the liberal debacle. As Walter Eucken argued:

Quite obviously, the reasons for the anti-capitalistic attitude of the masses cannot be found in any deterioration of the living conditions brought about by capitalism. […] The turning of the masses against capitalism is rather a phenomenon that can only be understood in terms of the sensibilities of modern man.  

In response, the left neoliberals called for an “organic policy” that would approach markets and competition as not purely an economic, but also a social phenomena (a similar view was expressed by Justice Brandeis). In this new hybrid vision of liberalism, “there would be counterweights to competition and the mechanical operation of prices.” Competition and the market’s other imperatives would be tempered by balancing considerations and subordinated to “higher values” that were beyond the law of supply and demand—and beyond mere economic utility. As Wilhelm Röpke summarizes:

Competition, which we need as a regulator in a free market economy, comes up on all sides against limits which we would not wish to transgress. It remains morally and socially dangerous and can be defended only up to a point and with qualifications and modifications of all kinds.

Conversely, right neoliberals believed that the downfall of liberalism had been the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of its true ethos and an overabundance of conflicting rules and policies. It was not the inevitable upshot of liberalism itself. As Lionel Robbins posited:

It is not liberal institutions but the absence of such institutions which is responsible for the chaos of today.

Classical liberalism had stopped short on the road to exploring the full range of laws and institutions needed to sustain and perfect the “natural order.” But the prevalent social malaise—which had, no doubt, been adroitly instigated and exploited by collectivist demagogues—was not the result of some innate incompatibility between markets and human society. It had instead come about because of the failure to properly adjust the latter to the exigencies of the former. 

Additionally, right neoliberals rejected “organic” or “third way” policies of the sort favored by the left neoliberals, because they believed that it was not within the remit of public policy to answer existential questions or to provide “meaning” or “social integration.”  Granting the state the power to decide on such matters was a slippery slope that required it to override the preferences of some with its own. As such, it got dangerously close to the sort of collectivism that neoliberals rallied in opposition to in the first place. They also doubted the state’s ability to resolve such complex, value-laden questions. It was insights such as these that underpinned Friedrich Hayek’s theory of the gradual march towards serfdom and Ludwig von Mises’ quip that there is no such thing as a “third way” or a mixed economy. 

In consequence, the solution was not to restrain, mollify, or limit the spread or depth of markets in order to align them with some past ideal of parochial life, but to improve markets and to acclimatize societies to their workings through better laws and institutions.

Two Different Visions for Liberalism For Two Different Visions of Antitrust

In keeping with the theme of this series, the prescriptions for antitrust policy made by each strand of neoliberalism are not doctrinally extrapolated from their broader vision of society.

Left neoliberals and American progressives took Marxist and fascist attacks on liberalism seriously, but sought to address them through less radical channels. They wanted a “mostly liberal” third-way social order, in which markets and competition would be tempered by a host of other social and political considerations that were mediated by the state. This meant opposing “big business” as a matter of principle, infusing antitrust law with a host of non-economic goals and values, and granting enforcers the necessary discretion to decide in cases of conflict. 

Right neoliberals, on the other hand, sought to improve on the classical-liberal position through a more robust legal and institutional framework that operated primarily in the service of a single goal: economic efficiency. Economic efficiency—itself not a value-free notion—was, however, seen as a comparatively neutral, narrow, and predictable standard that, in turn, cabined enforcers’  scope of discretion and minimized the instances in which the state could override business decisions (and thus interfere with negative liberty). In the context of antitrust law, this tethered anticompetitive conduct and exemptions to the threshold requirement to find harms to consumers or to total welfare.

Conclusion

The pendulum of neoliberalism has swung in the past, with momentous implications for antitrust. The “Chicagoan” shift of the 1970s, for instance, was a move toward right neoliberalism, as was the “more economic approach” of EU competition law in the late 1990s. Conversely, more recent calls for the condemnation of “big business” on a range of moral and political grounds; “polycentric competition laws” with multiple goals and values; and the widening of state discretion to lead market developments in a socially desirable direction signal a move in the opposite direction. 

How should the newest iteration of the neoliberal “battle for the soul of antitrust” be resolved?

On the one hand, left neoliberalism—or what Americans typically just call “progressivism”—has intuitive and emotional appeal, particularly in a time of growing anti-capitalistic fervor. Today, as in the 1930s, many believe that market logic has overstepped its legitimate boundaries and that the most successful private companies are a looming enemy. From this perspective, a “market in society” approach—in which the government has more leeway to restrain corporate power and reshape markets in accordance with a range of social or political considerations—may sound more humane to some. 

If history teaches us anything, however, this populist approach to regulating competition is problematic for a number of reasons.

First, the overly complex web of mutually conflicting goals and values will inevitably require enforcement agencies to act as social engineers. In this position, they may use their enhanced discretion to decide whom or what to favor and to rank subjective values pursuant to personal moral heuristics. Public-choice theory and historical examples of state-led collectivist projects, however, counsel against assuming that government is able and willing to exercise such far-reaching oversight of society. In addition, as enforcers inevitably prove unfit to discharge their new role as philosopher-kings, and as their contradictory case law increasingly comes under contestation, activist attempts to widen the scope of antitrust law likely will be checked by the courts. 

Second, like the non-economic arguments against concentration raised today by progressives such as Tim Wu and Lina Khan, the left neoliberal position is largely based on aesthetic preference and intuition—not fact. Röpkean complaints about big business ruining the bucolic landscape where men are “vitally satisfied” in their small, tight-knit communities rests on a very idiosyncratic vision of the good life (left neoliberals romanticized Switzerland, for instance), and it’s one many do not share in the 21st century. Equally particular were Justice Brandeis’ own yeoman sensibilities, which led him to reject bigness as a matter of principle (unlike today’s neo-Brandeisians, however, he was also skeptical of big government). 

As to the persistent argument to curb “bigness” on political grounds: this would be more convincing if there was a clear, unambiguous relationship between market concentration or company size and the quality of democracy. This does not appear to be the case. In fact, the case for incorporating democratic concerns into antitrust seems unwittingly to rely on discredited Marxist theories about the relationship between German big business and the rise of Hitler. Unfortunately, these ideas have been so aggressively peddled by Marxists—who had a vested ideological interest in demonstrating that private corporations were the main culprits behind Nazism—during the 1960s and 70s that today they enjoy the status of dogma.

Alternatively, one might argue that the very existence of large concentrations of private economic power is antithetical to democracy because having the potential to exercise private power over another (without any actual interference) is anti-democratic (see here). But this lifts a particularistic vision of democracy—so-called republican democracy—over others. According to the more mainstream notion of liberal democracy, which gives precedence to negative freedom, any such interference with property rights may, in fact, be seen as deeply illiberal and undemocratic, especially as the inherent ambiguity of the “democracy” standard is likely to invite reprisals against political opponents.

Alas, right neoliberalism appears to be falling out of favor, as anti-market rhetoric seeps into the mainstream and politicians and intellectuals look to the past to find alternatives to a neoliberal system seen as too narrow and economistic. Ultimately, however, this may be precisely what we want public policy to be in a liberal world: focused on predictable and quantifiable standards that subject enforcers to the rigorous discipline of economic theory and leave them little space to act as social engineers or to exercise arbitrary authority. More than a century of intellectual effervescence and dangerous intellectual escapades has proven this to be the superior way to achieve both measurable policy outcomes that improve on the classical-liberal position and to avoid the Charybdis of state collectivism. In antitrust law, it has meant embracing economic analysis of the law and a narrow consumer-welfare standard to discern anticompetitive from procompetitive conduct. 

In the end, today’s “battle for the soul” of antitrust is a proxy for a much wider conflict of visions. Changing the consumer-welfare standard and the architecture of antitrust enforcement along lines preferred by progressives and left neoliberals would be both a symptom and a cause of a broader philosophical shift toward a worldview that makes some of the same deleterious mistakes it purports to correct: excessive government discretion in overseeing the economy; the subordination of individual freedom to an array of collectivist goals mediated by a public aristocracy; and the substitution of evidence-based policy for emotional impetus.

While the inherent contradictions and incongruence of that vision mean that the pendulum is likely to eventually swing back in the right direction, the damage will already have been done. This is why we must defend the consumer-welfare standard today more vigorously than ever: because ultimately, much more than the future of a niche field of law is at stake.

In Antitrust & Competition, Truth on the Market , , , , , , ,
permalink

The Forgotten Strand of the Anti-Monopoly Tradition in Anglo-American Law

Ben Sperry —  13 January 2021

Admirers of the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and other antitrust populists often trace the history of American anti-monopoly sentiments from the Founding Era through the Progressive Era’s passage of laws to fight the scourge of 19th century monopolists. For example, Matt Stoller of the American Economic Liberties Project, both in his book Goliath and in other writings, frames the story of America essentially as a battle between monopolists and anti-monopolists.

According to this reading, it was in the late 20th century that powerful corporations and monied interests ultimately succeeded in winning the battle in favor of monopoly power against antitrust authorities, aided by the scholarship of the “ideological” Chicago school of economics and more moderate law & economics scholars like Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

It is a framing that leaves little room for disagreements about economic theory or evidence. One is either anti-monopoly or pro-monopoly, anti-corporate power or pro-corporate power.

What this story muddles is that the dominant anti-monopoly strain from English common law, which continued well into the late 19th century, was opposed specifically to government-granted monopoly. In contrast, today’s “anti-monopolists” focus myopically on alleged monopolies that often benefit consumers, while largely ignoring monopoly power granted by government. The real monopoly problem antitrust law fails to solve is its immunization of anticompetitive government policies. Recovering the older anti-monopoly tradition would better focus activists today.

Common Law Anti-Monopoly Tradition

Scholars like Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute have written about the right to earn a living that arose out of English common law and was inherited by the United States. This anti-monopoly stance was aimed at government-granted privileges, not at successful business ventures that gained significant size or scale.

For instance, 1602’s Darcy v. Allein, better known as the “Case of Monopolies,” dealt with a “patent” originally granted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1576 to Ralph Bowes, and later bought by Edward Darcy, to make and sell playing cards. Darcy did not innovate playing cards; he merely had permission to be the sole purveyor. Thomas Allein, who attempted to sell playing cards he created, was sued for violating Darcy’s exclusive rights. Darcy’s monopoly ultimately was held to be invalid by the court, which refused to convict Allein.

Edward Coke, who actually argued on behalf of the patent in Darcy v. Allen, wrote that the case stood for the proposition that:

All trades, as well mechanical as others, which prevent idleness (the bane of the commonwealth) and exercise men and youth in labour, for the maintenance of themselves and their families, and for the increase of their substance, to serve the Queen when occasion shall require, are profitable for the commonwealth, and therefore the grant to the plaintiff to have the sole making of them is against the common law, and the benefit and liberty of the subject. (emphasis added)

In essence, Coke’s argument was more closely linked to a “right to work” than to market structures, business efficiency, or firm conduct.

The courts largely resisted royal monopolies in 17th century England, finding such grants to violate the common law. For instance, in The Case of the Tailors of Ipswich, the court cited Darcy and found:

…at the common law, no man could be prohibited from working in any lawful trade, for the law abhors idleness, the mother of all evil… especially in young men, who ought in their youth, (which is their seed time) to learn lawful sciences and trades, which are profitable to the commonwealth, and whereof they might reap the fruit in their old age, for idle in youth, poor in age; and therefore the common law abhors all monopolies, which prohibit any from working in any lawful trade. (emphasis added)

The principles enunciated in these cases were eventually codified in the Statute of Monopolies, which prohibited the crown from granting monopolies in most circumstances. This was especially the case when the monopoly prevented the right to otherwise lawful work.

This common-law tradition also had disdain for private contracts that created monopoly by restraining the right to work. For instance, the famous Dyer’s case of 1414 held that a contract in which John Dyer promised not to practice his trade in the same town as the plaintiff was void for being an unreasonable restraint on trade.The judge is supposed to have said in response to the plaintiff’s complaint that he would have imprisoned anyone who had claimed such a monopoly on his own authority.

Over time, the common law developed analysis that looked at the reasonableness of restraints on trade, such as the extent to which they were limited in geographic reach and duration, as well as the consideration given in return. This part of the anti-monopoly tradition would later constitute the thread pulled on by the populists and progressives who created the earliest American antitrust laws.

Early American Anti-Monopoly Tradition

American law largely inherited the English common law system. It also inherited the anti-monopoly tradition the common law embodied. The founding generation of American lawyers were trained on Edward Coke’s commentary in “The Institutes of the Laws of England,” wherein he strongly opposed government-granted monopolies.

This sentiment can be found in the 1641 Massachusetts Body of Liberties, which stated: “No monopolies shall be granted or allowed amongst us, but of such new Inventions that are profitable to the Countrie, and that for a short time.” In fact, the Boston Tea Party itself was in part a protest of the monopoly granted to the East India Company, which included a special refund from duties by Parliament that no other tea importers enjoyed.

This anti-monopoly tradition also can be seen in the debates at the Constitutional Convention. A proposal to give the federal government power to grant “charters of incorporation” was voted down on fears it could lead to monopolies. Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, and several Antifederalists expressed concerns about the new national government’s ability to grant monopolies, arguing that an anti-monopoly clause should be added to the Constitution. Six states wanted to include provisions that would ban monopolies and the granting of special privileges in the Constitution.

The American anti-monopoly tradition remained largely an anti-government tradition throughout much of the 19th century, rearing its head in debates about the Bank of the United States, publicly-funded internal improvements, and government-granted monopolies over bridges and seas. Pamphleteer Lysander Spooner even tried to start a rival to the Post Office by appealing to the strong American impulse against monopoly.

Coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, liberalization of corporate law made it easier for private persons to organize firms that were not simply grants of exclusive monopoly. But discontent with industrialization and other social changes contributed to the birth of a populist movement, and later to progressives like Brandeis, who focused on private combinations and corporate power rather than government-granted privileges. This is the strand of anti-monopoly sentiment that continues to dominate the rhetoric today.

What This Means for Today

Modern anti-monopoly advocates have largely forgotten the lessons of the long Anglo-American tradition that found government is often the source of monopoly power. Indeed, American law privileges government’s ability to grant favors to businesses through licensing, the tax code, subsidies, and even regulation. The state action doctrine from Parker v. Brown exempts state and municipal authorities from antitrust lawsuits even where their policies have anticompetitive effects. And the Noerr-Pennington doctrine protects the rights of industry groups to lobby the government to pass anticompetitive laws.

As a result, government is often used to harm competition, with no remedy outside of the political process that created the monopoly. Antitrust law is used instead to target businesses built by serving consumers well in the marketplace.

Recovering this older anti-monopoly tradition would help focus the anti-monopoly movement on a serious problem modern antitrust misses. While the consumer-welfare standard that modern antitrust advocates often decry has helped to focus the law on actual harms to consumers, antitrust more broadly continues to encourage rent-seeking by immunizing state action and lobbying behavior.

In Amazon, Antitrust & Competition, Constitutional Law, Corporate & Securities Law, Economic Theory, Google, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Monopolization, Patent, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink

Comments on Jonathan Baker's Preserving a Political Bargain

Josh Wright —  21 May 2010

I’ve recently finished reading Jonathan Baker’s Preserving a Political Bargain: The Political Economy of the Non-Interventionist Challenge to Monopolization Enforcement, forthcoming in the Antitrust Law Journal.

Baker’s central thesis in Preserving a Political Bargain builds on earlier work concerning competition policy as an implicit political bargain that was reached during the 1940s between the more extreme positions of laissez-faire on the one hand and regulation on the other.  The new piece tries to explain what Baker describes as the “non-interventionist” critique of monopolization enforcement within this framework.  The piece is motivated, at least in part, by the Section 2 Report debates.  Baker’s basic story is fairly straightforward.  Under Baker’s account, competition policy is the outcome of the political bargaining process described above.  The “competition policy bargain” was then successfully modified in the 1980s in response to the Chicago School critique.  According to Baker, during the 1970s and 80s, “the Supreme Court revised many if not most of aspects of antitrust law along the lines suggested by legal and economic commentators loosely associated with the University of Chicago,” though this revolution changed the antitrust laws “dramatically but not fundamentally” and reflected a “bipartisan consensus in favor of reforming antitrust rules to enhance the efficiency gains arising from competition policy.”

Baker applies his “political bargain” framework to argue that the “modern non-interventionist critique,” unlike the successful attempt to modify the “terms” of the bargain in the 1980s, is highly likely to fail.  Baker defines the non-interventionist critique as relying on a particular series of legal and economic arguments.  For example, Baker describes the economic arguments deployed by the non-interventionists as that “markets are self-correcting,” “monopoly fosters economic growth,” “there is a single monopoly profit,” “excluded fringe rivals may not matter competitively,” “courts cannot reliably identify monopolization,” and so on.  Animated by the Section 2 Hearings, Report, its withdrawal, and the subsequent controversy, Baker begins from the assumption the non-interventionists are trying to modify an existing bargain, since non-interventionists are “the primary source of recent criticism of monopolization standards.”  From there, Baker argues that this concerted effort to modify the competition bargain in favor of less intervention is unlikely to succeed because such an attempted modification is unlikely to mobilize broader political support in the current social environment.

Let me start by saying that I agree entirely with the ultimate conclusion in so far as I don’t think there is any doubt that, in the current environment,  it is unlikely that the implicit “policy bargain” will be modified in a way that makes it more difficult for monopolization plaintiffs.  I have much more trouble with the premise of the exercise, and on how one knows a deviation from the current policy bargain when he sees one, and so will focus my critique on those issues.

Baker paints the picture of a dramatic and fundamental attack by non-interventionists on monopolization enforcement.  My response to the premise of the paper was: “What non-interventionist effort to further relax monopolization standards?” To be sure, there are plenty of folks who have cautioned against expansive use of Section 2.  It strikes me that the fundamental weakness in Baker’s analysis is that his starting point – the “terms” of the current political bargain — derives from  assumptions that don’t seem to square with reality.    In other words, rather than envisioning the current debates around Section 2 as an assault by non-interventionists, there is a much more compelling case that it is the interventionists attempting to “deviate” from whatever implicit political bargain exists with respect to competition policy.  Christine Varney’s declaration that there is “no such thing as a false positive” – the presence of such being a seminal observation since The Limits of Antitrust (in 1984, no less) immediately leaps to mind.  I will turn to making the case that it is the interventionists making the offer for modification below.

But first note that Baker leaves out of his list of “economic arguments” against Section 2 both error costs and that there is little empirical evidence that aggressive monopolization enforcement generates consumer benefits.  This is, in my view, an important omission since Baker makes the point that all of the other economic arguments have attracted rebuttals.  If there has been a rebuttal of the argument that the empirical evidence suggests that instances of anticompetitive exclusive dealing, RPM, tying and vertical integration are quite rare, or an empirical demonstration that monopolization enforcement has generated consumer welfare gains bet of error and administrative costs, I’d like to see it.  Further, note that the original Chicago School argument, a la Director & Levi, against monopolization enforcement was not that anticompetitive exclusion was impossible, but rather that it was sufficiently rare in the world as an empirical matter as to be irrelevant to policy formation.  Baker ignores this empirical, evidence-based non-interventionist critique, which, for example, has been the core of the position taken by modern academic skeptics of monopolization enforcement like myself, Dan Crane, Tim Muris, Bruce Kobayashi, Luke Froeb, and David Evans.

What is the evidence that there is a non-interventionist attack on the current competition policy bargain as it exists with respect to monopolization? Not much.  The first is that the non-interventionists are the “source of criticism of recent monopolization standards.”  In parts of the paper, Baker equates the non-interventionists with business interests.  But under that formulation, there is not much evidence to support this proposition.  If anything, and as Baker readily acknowledges in a footnote, the headlines seem to tell a story of AMD, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and others expending resources to instigate antitrust enforcement against rivals not to restrict the scope of Section 2.

Baker cites more generally the recent monopolization controversy as driven by the non-interventionist attempt to deviate from the status quo.  But this part of the analysis reads to me as driven entirely by assertion that the competition policy preferences that Baker appears to prefer are in the “political bargain” and deeming opposition to those (interventionist) policies attempted “deviations.”  Perhaps this is a problem of hammers and nails.  Baker’s more interventionist than I and so sees obstacles between his ideal vision of antitrust law and reality as caused by non-interventionists.  But I’ve got a different hammer and see different nails.  For example, I read the Section 2 Report as largely (but not entirely) limited to a description of Section 2 law as it exists and the vigorously dissenting voices coming from the interventionist crowd.  As George Priest has put it:

It’s fair enough for a succeeding administration to reject policies of its predecessor. But the Justice Department report was not authored by John Yoo or Alberto Gonzales. It was the work of a year-long study that considered recommendations from 29 panels and 119 witnesses, most of them critical of the minimalist Chicago School approach to antitrust law. The report’s conclusions basically track Supreme Court law with modest extensions in areas where the Supreme Court has not ruled. Ms. Varney denounced the report in its entirety.

Finding the evidence lacking of some strong non-interventionist attempt to impose dramatic change on Section 2 that deviates from the current political bargain, I offer an alternative hypothesis: it is the interventionists that are attempting to deviate from the current political bargain and propose change.

For starters, I think that Baker and I would agree that there actually is a “stable” competition policy bargain with respect to monopolization that has drawn bipartisan over the last twenty years – at least in the courts.  Note that even restricting attention to decisions during the George W. Bush administration from 2004-08, the total vote count of these decisions was 86-9, with 7 of 11 decisions decided unanimously, and only Leegin attracted more than two votes of dissent (and more likely, as others have pointed out, for its implications with respect to abortion jurisprudence than anything to do with the antitrust analysis of vertical restraints!).  The monopolization-related decisions of the modern era, including Trinko, Linkline, Credit Suisse, and Brooke Group have all made lift more difficult for plaintiffs in one way or another.  But as I’ve written on this blog over and over again, the error-cost analysis embedded in these decisions is a key feature of modern Section 2 jurisprudence that is part of the current bargain.  So as I understand it, these decisions must be part of the current bargain.  It would be difficult, in fact, to find another area of law in which the Court has articulated principles with such overriding unanimity despite persistent attempts by some scholars to advocate for an alternate overarching legal framework.  I think there is a much more compelling story – and one backed by greater evidence than Baker’s narrative — to tell about the modern attempt of the interventionists to renegotiate terms.    Let’s discuss some of the evidence.

For starters, the strongly-toned dissents from the Section 2 Report from both Agencies after Hearings with witnesses and testimony from all possible sides of debate — even the parts that merely describe the law — suggest dissatisfaction with the terms of the modern bargain Baker describes and that are represented by the monopolization case law created over the past several decades by supermajority Supreme Court decisions.  It is AAG Varney who recently, as Baker acknowledges in the paper, minimized the importance of Trinko under Section 2 in favor of “tried and true” cases like Aspen Skiing.  This is, of course, to say nothing of AAG Varney’s endorsement of an antitrust policy free of error-cost considerations.

Further, it is the interventionists at the Federal Trade Commission that have turned to an expanded vision of Section 5 to evade the constraints imposed by Section 2.  In fact, the Commission has explicitly announced that it does not think that the constraints imposed on plaintiffs under Section 2 should apply to the antitrust agencies!  If this is not an attempt to deviate from the existing political bargain in an interventionist direction, I’m not sure what is.  Put another way, interventionists are currently attempting to re-write existing Section 2 law – the “political bargain” – through Section 5. Given the Complaint in Intel and promised use of Section 5 in broad circumstances previously covered under the Section 2 law envisioned under the “stable” bargain that Baker describes as generating bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans, surely this is an attempt to deviate from the prior bargain.

It is the interventionists that have provided new economic arguments in favor of greater antitrust enforcement.  For example, the recent trend towards reliance on behavioral economics endorsed by the agencies emerges out of dissatisfaction with Chicago and Post-Chicago School theories that adopt rational actor models and, presumably, inability to get substantial traction in the federal courts from existing interventionist models provided by the Post-Chicago School.

The interventionist assault on the current implicit competition policy bargain goes further than the agencies though.  Congress currently has in front of it pending legislation to take out of the courts the development of a rule of reason standard for minimum RPM, a Twombly-repealer, legislation to make reverse payments in pharmaceutical patent settlements illegal, and legislation to regulate interchange fees.  Every one of these proposals represents an interventionist reaction attempting to overturn a judicial application of current competition law and suggest that perhaps the interventionists do not trust the courts to oversee the political bargain.

The premise of Baker’s analysis (that the non-interventionists are strongly challenging the current status quo) is either false to begin with or practically irrelevant in light of the much more important interventionist challenge.  Note again that Baker’s claim is that the non-interventionists would fail in any attempt to reduce the scope of monopolization enforcement because they will not be able to generate more broad political support in the current environment.  No doubt that is true.  But what about the interventionists chances for success?  Baker’s analysis provides a very interesting lens to analysis evaluate questions like whether the interventionists will be successful in renegotiating the terms of the competition policy bargain.  At the moment, though things may be changing, they seem to have greater political support.  I think the most interesting conflict arising out of Baker’s interesting conception of competition between stakeholders in antitrust policy is that it illuminates what might be a battle for supremacy in governing the bargain between agencies and courts.  As Baker notes, the courts have been a critical part of establishing the terms of the bargain and adjudicating attempts to “re-negotiate” by private plaintiffs and agencies over time.  Recently, interventionists have attempted to shift antitrust (and consumer protection) enforcement away from courts and towards administrative agencies, such as with Section 5 and the proposed CFPA.   To me, these present more important and interesting policy questions than whether non-interventionists will be successful in further shrinking Section 2 law.  I believe that the prediction emerging from Baker’s model depends on what happens with the political environment in the next few years.

My prediction, for what its worth, is that the current policy bargain will certainly hold together in the courts.  The remarkable strength of the current Section 2 status quo is held together by a combination of the intuitive appeal of price theory for generalist judges relative to more interventionist Post-Chicago and Behavioral economic alternatives, the relative explanatory power of the so-called Chicago School theories relative to contenders.  Nothing there has changed.  I have less of a sense about the impact of Congressional changes, judicial nominations, and the rise of the EU as monopolization enforcer have on monopolization in the US.

In Antitrust & Competition, Error Costs, European Union, Exclusive Dealing, Facebook, Federal Trade Commission, Health Care, Intellectual Property, International, Justice Department, Patent, Pharmaceuticals, Platforms, Regulation, Section 5, Tying, Vertical Restraints , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink