The public is demanding antitrust reform.

Moreover, in a democracy, the success of the antitrust enterprise depends on the public’s continuing support. But, as Daniel Crane noted recently:

The bipartisan consensus that antitrust should solely focus on economic efficiency and consumer welfare has quite suddenly come under attack from prominent voices [from the political left and right] calling for a dramatically enhanced role for antitrust law in mediating a variety of social, economic, and political friction points, including employment, wealth inequality, data privacy and security, and democratic values.164

Crane also describes how “the rising tide of calls for a radically different version of antitrust has led to a circling of [the bipartisan antitrust] establishment wagons around the consumer-welfare standard” despite major disagreements within this establishment on the meaning and implementation of that standard.165

Such a response by the establishment may not be the most productive. If dissatisfaction with the current antitrust status quo becomes a shared view of the political left and the right in a period when they seem incapable of finding common ground on almost any issue, then insisting that the status quo is just fine and that the criticism is based on fundamental misunderstanding of existing antitrust’s greatness may not be very persuasive. Put differently, if growing swaths of the public become concerned about the distribution of power and its exercise, then telling them that antitrust should only care about efficiency may cause them to abandon their support for the antitrust enterprise altogether.

Furthermore, there may be other costs to ignoring antitrust’s political dimension. One of the motivations for adopting the antitrust laws (and the reasons why the antitrust enterprise also gained the support of business) was the realization that the ills of monopoly, not only high prices, but also the helplessness of those who have little choice but to depend on the monopoly, may lead to social unrest. In the worst case, this might lead to a loss of credibility for democratic governance and even to the rise of totalitarianism, or at least to excessive intervention of the government in the operation of markets, either by way of overregulation or central planning. Thus, the alternative to vigorously enforced competition laws is not the classic economist’s liberal laissez-faire utopia, but a society that is neither free nor productive.

To the extent that the present crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of illiberal tendencies in many countries is connected, at least in part, to the reign of Chicago School economics (and other neoliberal prescriptions) and the frustration of those who found themselves waiting in vain for economic benefits to trickle down, then insisting on a business-as-usual approach to antitrust law and policy may come with a high price. In other words, however skeptical one might be about the desirability of acknowledging antitrust’s political dimension, the alternative—ignoring it— might be worse.