Amazing How FTC’s Many Antitrust Cases Kahns Us

Having covered the nation’s antitrust lawyers for the leading legal pub, it’s the suits who will benefit most from the growing number of monopoly bust cases now plaguing big business. Trust me. Or, trust the WSJ’s Holman Jenkins who came to the same conclusion in his “Let a Biden Reappraisal Include Antitrust”.

Mr. Holman takes Biden appointee & now FTC head Lina Khan to task for launching the legal crusade against a large line up of merger-friendly companies. He noted: “Ms. Kahan, now 32, made her name with a 2017 law student article arguing that Amazon should be broken up because it should be broken up. Now she’s getting to put her urges to work, first with Facebook & we can already anticipate the results: Unless a judge puts the case out of its misery, it will drag on for a decade; the technological & commercial issues will quickly become moot; only fixerdom will derive any real benefit in the form of billings. And Ms. Khan will have long departed to become a leading ornament of Washington’s antitrust bar, its least productive interest group.”

What Mr. Jenkins doesn’t quite nail is how mind-numbingly “complex” the mathematical formulas relied upon by antitrust lawyers to make their cases are. On the other hand, how insightful he is in suggesting how simple aka political the outcomes always seem to be: “When you see a volunteer in yellow vest picking up trash by the roadside, think: That person is doing more for the commonweal than all the antitrust lawyers put together.”

Davd Soul