monopolies Archives — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

Tom Bowden, who does an incredible job editing most of the posts you see on the blog, has a terrific op-ed in Investor’s Business Daily. The subject: the antitrust assault on Google.

How do the world’s most powerful governments get away with treating Google like a villain? After all, this is a company that has built a reputation for improving people’s lives in a thousand ways.

Just ask the millions of visitors who type keywords into Google’s legendary search engine, or who use the many other services — email, maps, videos, travel arrangements, comparison shopping, books, and the like — that Google offers for free. Yes, for free.

The answer lies buried in the unavoidable vagaries of antitrust law — an irrational regime that grants competitive grumblings the exalted status of legal injuries, then empowers government enforcers to override market outcomes.

Whole thing here.

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Over at Voices for Reason my colleague Tom Bowden has some good observations on the recent acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney.

Antitrust law requires notification to the FTC of every contemplated transaction that exceeds a certain dollar amount. Of course, this means that only relatively successful companies fall under FTC scrutiny. And it’s not just a matter of notification—there’s a mandatory waiting period (30 days, subject to extension), while the FTC decides if it’s going to allow the transaction to go forward.

Oh, yes—you can ask the FTC to give its go-ahead without waiting 30 days. But a so-called early termination only happens when both the FTC and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department have completed their reviews and decided not to take enforcement action.There’s even a website where companies can check every day for grants of permission.

Remember when you had to ask your mother for permission to cross the street? Today, America’s most successful businessmen and shareholders find themselves stuck in a similar position, forced to beg for Uncle Sam’s permission before consummating merger transactions that advance their financial self-interest.

It’s a “Mother may I?” economy, fueled by the basic premise behind antitrust—the idea that the more market success a company achieves, the greater threat it poses to consumers and the economy. After all, when federal law regards every businessman as an incipient criminalwho must be tethered and tamed by government coercion, notifications and waiting periods make perfect sense, right?

Whole thing here.

If you would like to ask me a question, you can submit it here.