The American elite has *always* hated antitrust. In the 1980s, #RonaldReagan, abetted by #RobertBork and his co-conspirators at the #ChicagoSchoolOfEconomics gutted antitrust through something called the "#ConsumerWelfareStandard," which ended anti-monopoly enforcement except in instances where price hikes could be directly and unarguably attributed to market power, which is, basically, never.
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They haven't made a secret of this. 40 years ago, the antitrust bar underwent a hostile takeover by billionaires' lickspittles from the #ChicagoSchoolOfEconomics, who explicitly argued that #monopolies were *good* and demanded that judges ignore 75 years of jurisprudence and use antitrust law to *defend* monopolies:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby
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President Biden’s July 9 Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy is a highly technical, 72-part, fine-grained memo on how to address the ways market concentration harms our lives as workers, citizens, consumers, and beyond. To a casual reader, this may seem like a dry bit...
Cory Doctorow