[…]
A paper by Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute likewise found that the Biden administration “made progress in invigorating merger enforcement in some areas but may be lagging behind in others.”
Moss, a former head of the American Antitrust Institute, told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.
[…]
Biden’s antitrust enforcers were also wrong to believe that their Democratic predecessors had ignored all factors other than costs to consumers. Although Lynn criticized “the more modern consumer welfare standard,” Moss writes in a forthcoming paper, he misunderstood “what the standard was and what it could restrain—information that was indelibly imprinted on Lynn’s mentees.”
[…]
