Antitrust

How Antitrust Failed Workers, by Eric A. Posner (Oxford University Press, 224 pp., $29.95) In 1776, Adam Smith made perhaps the most famous statement linking monopoly power to labor. “Masters,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the […]

U.S. antirust doctrine and practice has long failed to consider issues of industrial competitiveness. The result has been a century of government-induced industrial failures. In America antitrust is conceived as oppositional: against market power. Antitrust enforcers have never seen their job as enabling U.S. enterprises (and by extension the U.S. economy) win the global competitiveness […]

Wednesday’s “must watch” House Judiciary hearing with the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google raised a host of questions, including what the goal of antitrust should be (maximizing economic welfare or other goals, like protecting small business), and how should we think about platform industries. There are two key central things to understand about […]

Welcome to American Compass. Our mission is to restore an economic consensus that emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. Many of the most insightful and creative policymakers, researchers, and pundits on the American right-of-center, and some on the left-of-center as well, are dedicating tremendous intellectual energy toward […]