Baker on the Inter-Agency Divide
Perhaps you need a little relief from watching the distressing news from Wall Street. Here is an article by Jonathan Baker in the New Republic: Turning on Itself: How Dueling Agencies in the Bush Administration Made Mincemeat of Antitrust Regulation Policy. I daresay much will be written about the antitrust legacy of the Bush administration, and the recent Single-Firm Conduct report will be regarded as an effort to leave a tangible legacy of the administration’s impact on antitrust doctrine. Here is a taste from Baker’s article:
There’s no doubt that the non-interventionists at Justice are thoughtful and principled, but in cutting back on antitrust enforcement, they have taken antitrust policy in a dangerous direction. Even the FTC’s counterweight won’t undo the damage because the FTC specializes in different industries. It will take time, of course, to see how the non-interventionist antitrust stance at Justice affects people’s everyday lives–if the small Korean appliance importers can challenge Whirlpool’s dominance, for example. But, with luck, the damage will be minimal, and we can rid the Justice Department of the deregulatory radicalism that allows monopolies to spin out of control if a new administration rolls into town in January.
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September 16th, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Here’s another example of why magazine editors should leave the headlines to the authors. Baker’s point is emphatically not that inter-agency duels have made “mincemeat” of “antitrust regulation policy,” but rather that DOJ’s non-interventionist stance has taken antitrust policy in a dangerous direction and that the FTC, because of institutional constraints, has been unable to stem the tide or “undo the damage.”