New York to revolutionize antitrust

“Consumer Welfare” is bad for your welfare.

The New York legislature is about to take up SB933, an historically significant antitrust bill that is poised to reverse decades of monopolism by repudiating the destructive, corporate-power enhancing, deceptively named “consumer welfare” principle.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2021/s933

40 years ago, Ronald Reagan adopted the “consumer welfare” standard, a fringe idea pushed by Nixon’s crooked solicitor general Robert Bork in an influential book called “The Antitrust Paradox” (Reagan’s successors, Republican and Democrat, have all bolstered Borkism).

Prior to “consumer welfare,” the US government prosecuted monopolies because they created unaccountable concentrations of power, allowing a few ultra-wealthy executives to decide how we worked and lived, corrupting politicians and breaking laws with impunity.

Bork insisted that “your business is too powerful” was too squishy and subjective a basis for law-enforcement, and insisted that we should make trustbusters empirically prove a) that harm had occurred; and b) that it was due to monopoly power.

This may sound reasonable, but it was a stalking horse for ending antitrust enforcement altogether. Bork’s “empiricism” meant…