Surge pricing violates antitrust law

Even the weaksauce version pushed by the econ establishment.

If you’ve paid any attention to the resurgent debate over antitrust, you’ve likely met the “consumer welfare standard,” which is the cornerstone of post-Reagan monopoly law, and which is widely (and correctly) blamed for our new gilded age of vast, unaccountable monopolies.

In the years between the New Deal and the Reagan revolution, the cornerstone of antitrust enforcement was the idea that monopolies are just bad — bad for a clean political process free from excessive corporate corruption.

The watchword of this kind of antitrust is “harmful dominance” — the idea that monopolies hurt workers, suppliers, bystanders, customers, and the legitimacy of the democratic system itself.

Reagan jettisoned those notions, heeding the cries of the Nixonite criminal Robert Bork and his colleagues from the Chicago School of economics, who claimed that “harmful dominance” was too subjective and gave rise to unpredictable enforcement.

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

“Consumer welfare” was supposed to replace the squishy, qualitative world of “harmful dominance” with an empirical, quantitative standard for when monopolies would face justice. That…