Was Anything Scandalous Said at This Antitrust Hearing?

Unlike last time I went to a Senate antitrust hearing , I heard nothing scandalous at today’s. Nothing, except everything.

Is it not scandalous to hear a law antithetical to the moral meaning of free enterprise called the “Magna Carta of free enterprise”? To hear a law created to empower the federal government to violate individual rights compared to the Bill of Rights, which was created to restrain the federal government and protect individual rights?

Is it not scandalous to hear legislators celebrate a law that coercively controls the terms of voluntary trades to favor a certain side? Even if that side is that of "the consumer"?

Is it not scandalous to hear an official, Antitrust Division Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer , brag that he has thrown away more than 90 years of productive people’s lives because they have done business with other willing traders on their own terms and for their own goals ?

Is it not scandalous to hear an official charged with preventing private enterprises from making profits “anticompetitively” attempt to show the value of his agency in terms of what would be called profits if the revenue involved weren’t criminal fines?

Those are some of the things I heard today, and they reflect the premises of the whole hearing, and indeed, of antitrust law. And if these are not scandalous things to hear, they ought to be.

Related reading:

• How Antitrust Competes Against Freedom
• The InBev Merger, The Price Of Corona, And The Cost Of Antitrust
• The Godsenator

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