Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on… Today I’m going to write a bit about how the coronavirus is going to radically reorient our antitrust and political economy regimes. But first, I was on the American Bar Association Antitrust division’s podcast to talk cheerleading. You can listen
Matt, I was wondering who would be on your dream list of potential SCOTUS appointments from an antitrust perspective. Seems like a useful project would be to try to build some kind of anti-monopoly version of the Federalist Society to vet potential judicial appointees.
Somewhere along the way finance in a given company became paramount! And I do not know how to tell anyone but CFOs do not know how to make anything! There only mantra is cheaper!
I'd like to see resiliency becoming a more explicit policy goal going forward and a more widely used term. The above article is a good example on the tradeoffs between efficiency and resiliency having been out of whack for far too long.
About 30 years ago, Mike Pence was my Representative, and he was in favor of tariffs on Chinese steel. Being that we worked in an industry which fabricated all our products with steel, both a friend and I were against the idea, and he talked to Pence at a county fair about it. Pence explained that it was a national defense issue: that, if we let China sell us all the steel we needed, we would shut down all our own steel plants, and, when push comes to shove, we wouldn't be able to make tanks and artillery for the next war. This is a very clear and straightforward example of the massive problem we now face in almost all industries, thanks to monopolization and offshoring. And it would be one thing to offshore all of our production to a friendly nation, but I can't understand how our government has allowed us to do this with a nation that can only be described as a "frenemy." And, further, one which has blatantly and shamelessly stolen American IP for decades. We've really dug ourselves a hole here, in the name of nice-looking, stock-price-inflating, short-term profits. Even if Congress and the courts woke up today, it would take us decades to unravel this mess.
"Having multiple rivals in the market means you have redundancies, and that’s waste, whereas having very few or just one producer - aka a monopoly - limits excess."
Is this the reason we don't live in the land of plenty that people predicted the industrial age would create 120+ years ago? Artificial scarcity and artificial expense?
You basically say it right here. The economic stimulus we need for the current situation is a few hundreds of billions spent by the government to fund the startup of monopoly competitors, starting with those monopolies most pertinent to the current situation.
Matt, I was wondering who would be on your dream list of potential SCOTUS appointments from an antitrust perspective. Seems like a useful project would be to try to build some kind of anti-monopoly version of the Federalist Society to vet potential judicial appointees.
Somewhere along the way finance in a given company became paramount! And I do not know how to tell anyone but CFOs do not know how to make anything! There only mantra is cheaper!
I'd like to see resiliency becoming a more explicit policy goal going forward and a more widely used term. The above article is a good example on the tradeoffs between efficiency and resiliency having been out of whack for far too long.
About 30 years ago, Mike Pence was my Representative, and he was in favor of tariffs on Chinese steel. Being that we worked in an industry which fabricated all our products with steel, both a friend and I were against the idea, and he talked to Pence at a county fair about it. Pence explained that it was a national defense issue: that, if we let China sell us all the steel we needed, we would shut down all our own steel plants, and, when push comes to shove, we wouldn't be able to make tanks and artillery for the next war. This is a very clear and straightforward example of the massive problem we now face in almost all industries, thanks to monopolization and offshoring. And it would be one thing to offshore all of our production to a friendly nation, but I can't understand how our government has allowed us to do this with a nation that can only be described as a "frenemy." And, further, one which has blatantly and shamelessly stolen American IP for decades. We've really dug ourselves a hole here, in the name of nice-looking, stock-price-inflating, short-term profits. Even if Congress and the courts woke up today, it would take us decades to unravel this mess.
"Having multiple rivals in the market means you have redundancies, and that’s waste, whereas having very few or just one producer - aka a monopoly - limits excess."
Is this the reason we don't live in the land of plenty that people predicted the industrial age would create 120+ years ago? Artificial scarcity and artificial expense?
You basically say it right here. The economic stimulus we need for the current situation is a few hundreds of billions spent by the government to fund the startup of monopoly competitors, starting with those monopolies most pertinent to the current situation.