Who, exactly, manages the U.S. economy? And what happens when the people who run it convert it into their own private club — one that has a guest list that somehow never includes you?
Big Tech giants like Apple decide which apps you’re allowed to see and use. Remember when it shut down Parler?
One day Parler was up. The next day Parler was gone — just because Apple decided the wrong people were talking too much.
That’s a very convenient arrangement, don’t you think?
Big banks and payment processors often play the role of gatekeepers too — deciding which businesses get accounts, which transactions get processed, and, in some cases, who gets access to the financial system at all. Conservatives learned just how much power those institutions wield during the years-long fight over politically motivated “debanking.”
Then there are the pharmacy benefit managers — middlemen who stand between you and the medicine your doctor prescribed. They decide which drugs get covered by insurance, which pharmacies you get to use, and how much you pay.
Do we honestly believe these people have the patients’ best interests at heart?
Of course we don’t.
Average people lose choices and smaller competitors must follow the rules as written by the powerful and well-connected.
Their latest racket is in housing.
Giant real estate players are creating preferred networks, where the well-connected get the first look at available homes on the market while regular buyers are left to scour through a public market that no longer always presents everything that’s actually for sale.
House Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chair Scott Fitzgerald is asking the right questions. He has demanded answers from Compass — the country’s biggest real estate brokerage — and Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) MLS system about the private listings partnership they have popularized together, which only MRED members can see. Because the MLS controls nearly all the listings that are visible in one particular region, this anti-competitive behavior has real consequences.
But the American people have many allies in their corner.
Just like Rep. Fitzgerald and the rest of his colleagues on the congressional antitrust subcommittee, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have also never been afraid to enforce the competition laws on the books to protect
Populist conservatives should always do antitrust this way — enforcing the law, knocking down the barriers anti-free market actors put up, and giving regular people a fair shot at competing. But then getting the hell out of the way.
The goal should be to protect competition, not to remake the economy to fit a more egalitarian, socialistic model — like how the Biden administration prevented low-cost airlines Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue from merging, leading to Spirit’s bankruptcy earlier this year. That didn’t help consumers. That led to less choices and higher fare costs.
What helps consumers is a government willing to take down the corporate actors who violate the consumer welfare standard and leave Americans with fewer choices, not more. Right now, the most urgent target for that kind of enforcement is the housing industry.
The hallmarks of a free marketplace are competition, choice, and the promise that an outsider can still knock the people on top off their perch by building a better mousetrap.
America’s economy is supposed to be a marketplace open to everyone, not a managed economy that has its rules set by the members of a members-only club. The more Congress, Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson can do to keep it that way, the better off we’ll all be.
Hellbound and Down 