Daniel Francis reviews the evolutionary and revolutionary dimensions of the Biden administration’s antitrust work, and argues that these two projects have been in deep tension. He concludes that the administration’s evolutionary work within the welfarist paradigm has generated some important successes, but that the revolutionary effort to restore a pre-welfarist vision of antitrust has failed on its own terms — and, in failing, has left welfarism all the stronger.| ProMarket
Tim Brennan finds the new shift in antitrust thought and enforcement connected to the Neo-Brandeisian movement to be flawed for the most part. However, he writes that a reinvigorated focus on tacit collusion, which some have blamed on the rise of prices for groceries and apartment rents, may deserve consideration and further study.| ProMarket
John W. Mayo reviews whether or not the articulated principles and priorities of the Neo-Brandeisian movement in antitrust scholarship and enforcement represent a “paradigm shift,” per the philosophy of Thomas Kuhn. Mayo finds that the Neo-Brandeisian discourse is best understood as situated within the continuum of the current antitrust paradigm, and that many of its efforts to substantiate its distinctive ideas have failed to properly ground them in empiricism or repudiate existing studies.| ProMarket
Congress passed the first antitrust law, the Sherman Act, in 1890 as a "comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade." In 1914,| Federal Trade Commission
