The New Paradox

Antitrust and the Threat of Conservative Socialism

By: Robert H. Bork Jr, Mark W. Davis

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

What is the result when the Republican Party, the long-time champion of free-market principles, discards them to embrace many of the state-based solutions of the Democratic Party? You have conservative socialism. We are seeing a Republican Administration embrace industrial policy with gusto. The White House has used its trade and regulatory authority to take a big cut of one U.S. company’s semiconductor exports, forced an equity stake on a major tech company to become its largest shareholder, while proposing price controls in industries ranging from pharmaceuticals to financial services.

Tariffs are often lifted or imposed according to the political position of a company, or the connections of its lobbyists.

Regulatory threats and the blockage of mergers have been used to punish news organizations and talk show hosts for their speech.

Nowhere is the leftward turn of the Republican Party more apparent than in antitrust.

The Biden Administration had set out guidelines for mergers and acquisitions that barely mentioned consumers but defined many reasons for the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission to stop any merger cold. These guidelines were so ideological and political that they were denounced by 17 former chief economists of the Justice Department and FTC from both parties.

• Now the Trump Administration regulators have embraced these guidelines with no changes, while continuing the legacy antitrust actions of the Biden Administration. They have jettisoned the Consumer Welfare Standard as its guiding light, a policy that judged every business deal not by political connections or ideological purity, but by benefits for working, consuming Americans.
• On Capitol Hill, Republican senators long seen as rock-solid conservatives are aligning with Sen. Elizabeth Warren to endorse government schemes to control the internet and to widen antitrust enforcement to make virtually any significant business deals impossible. That won’t be a correction. That will be the fossilization of capitalism.

Conservatives must wake up to what is happening, and how much is at stake. The strange afterlife of Biden antitrust policies in the Trump Administration must be reversed in order to defend a free-market system integral to the American way.

The New Paradox is a spirited call for conservatives to wake up and reverse this tide of conservative socialism.