I'm a libertarian, and I believe that antitrust is a good thing. I believe this, simply because it's part of the precedent now. It's rarely used anyway, it isn't something we use every day or something like that.
there are way worse things that need to be done away with. I'm thinking of the surveillance state.
Nothing in the Constitution protects the right to charge whatever "monopoly prices" are. It merely protects the right of Congress to grant the inventors the "exclusive right" of a patented item. Price was never mentioned in the Constitution, and however Congress chooses to define or limit "exclusive right" is up to them.
If Congress chooses to use their intellectual property or interstate commerce power to regulate the pricing of a monopoly (protected or illegal) they have that power. If Congress chooses to make non-patent monopolies illegal under these powers, they have that power.
This is so incredibly obvious.
One thing that has long struck me about the courts is that the justices and judges are not a microcosm of the populace in terms of personality, they are a very constrained subset on average. We need more diversity of thinking types on the courts, not just intellectual diversity.
The economy is very much like ecology requiring diversity in order to be able to function in a relatively stable way. Otherwise the ecology/economy will crash.
While we no longer evolve genetically, we have the intellect to evolve socially and should take the lessons learned from genetic evolution and apply them to society for social evolution to advance. Multi-level selection is powerful, but requires safeguards to prevent cheating and breakdowns of that path. Ironically, between group (company) selection based on capitalism is the only way to keep the system honest. In a capitalistic society, those groups (companies) where cooperation fails will soon be out of business. This process is social selection at the group (company) level. The trust me attitude of an autocratic socialistic society cannot provide adequate safeguards to allow social evolution to keep evolving. As with genetic selection, there can be no evolution without failure, i.e. survival of the fittest groups means that some groups must fail, and be allowed to fail, such that new groups can be formed to continue the process.
All organisms (humans included) will keep evolving as long as DNA exists, which is roughly a billion years, at which point the Sun's output will cause all the Earth's oceans to boil off into outer space. And that's only assuming humanity hasn't colonised the galaxy by that point.
We will not stop evolving genetically for the foreseeable future. It is foreseeably way too difficult to absolutely control every single nucleotide in a human's genome, much less control how alleles recombine during the conception of a new person. And that's before you get into mate selection.
Even if the technologies were available human culture would have to change into a "Brave New World" like dystopia to stop human evolution.
"Social evolution" of the type you are describing already occurs. Never overlook that organisms proactively change their environment all the time - ideally to be better places for them. This is directly analogous to crony capitalism and regulatory capture. What you want are more powerful social organisms altering the parameters of "social evolution" (equivalent to changing the landscape) to be a place better for smaller, newer, or more cooperative firms, which is fine, I do too.
Very enlightening piece, Matt. I’m curious as someone who has not followed the history of the Federalist Society, do they have the ability to evolve and incorporate novel interpretations on core issues such as this or is the die fully cast? Or is the speed of such change beyond the scope of impacting the current monopoly anti-trust conversations?
It depends on who is paying their bills. They always had more money than they collected from law students. By contrast ACS was almost entirely funded by the students. The Democratic Party orgs were the real counterweight at my law school back in the 2010's.
I'm a libertarian, and I believe that antitrust is a good thing. I believe this, simply because it's part of the precedent now. It's rarely used anyway, it isn't something we use every day or something like that.
there are way worse things that need to be done away with. I'm thinking of the surveillance state.
Nothing in the Constitution protects the right to charge whatever "monopoly prices" are. It merely protects the right of Congress to grant the inventors the "exclusive right" of a patented item. Price was never mentioned in the Constitution, and however Congress chooses to define or limit "exclusive right" is up to them.
If Congress chooses to use their intellectual property or interstate commerce power to regulate the pricing of a monopoly (protected or illegal) they have that power. If Congress chooses to make non-patent monopolies illegal under these powers, they have that power.
This is so incredibly obvious.
One thing that has long struck me about the courts is that the justices and judges are not a microcosm of the populace in terms of personality, they are a very constrained subset on average. We need more diversity of thinking types on the courts, not just intellectual diversity.
Scalia is totally wrong.
The economy is very much like ecology requiring diversity in order to be able to function in a relatively stable way. Otherwise the ecology/economy will crash.
https://thisviewoflife.com/when-the-strong-outbreed-the-weak-an-interview-with-william-muir/
While we no longer evolve genetically, we have the intellect to evolve socially and should take the lessons learned from genetic evolution and apply them to society for social evolution to advance. Multi-level selection is powerful, but requires safeguards to prevent cheating and breakdowns of that path. Ironically, between group (company) selection based on capitalism is the only way to keep the system honest. In a capitalistic society, those groups (companies) where cooperation fails will soon be out of business. This process is social selection at the group (company) level. The trust me attitude of an autocratic socialistic society cannot provide adequate safeguards to allow social evolution to keep evolving. As with genetic selection, there can be no evolution without failure, i.e. survival of the fittest groups means that some groups must fail, and be allowed to fail, such that new groups can be formed to continue the process.
..........................-1
"While we no longer evolve genetically"
All organisms (humans included) will keep evolving as long as DNA exists, which is roughly a billion years, at which point the Sun's output will cause all the Earth's oceans to boil off into outer space. And that's only assuming humanity hasn't colonised the galaxy by that point.
Great article you link to.
They needed a third experiment where they bred the best laying hens from the best laying pens.
"While we no longer evolve genetically"
We will not stop evolving genetically for the foreseeable future. It is foreseeably way too difficult to absolutely control every single nucleotide in a human's genome, much less control how alleles recombine during the conception of a new person. And that's before you get into mate selection.
Even if the technologies were available human culture would have to change into a "Brave New World" like dystopia to stop human evolution.
"Social evolution" of the type you are describing already occurs. Never overlook that organisms proactively change their environment all the time - ideally to be better places for them. This is directly analogous to crony capitalism and regulatory capture. What you want are more powerful social organisms altering the parameters of "social evolution" (equivalent to changing the landscape) to be a place better for smaller, newer, or more cooperative firms, which is fine, I do too.
Very enlightening piece, Matt. I’m curious as someone who has not followed the history of the Federalist Society, do they have the ability to evolve and incorporate novel interpretations on core issues such as this or is the die fully cast? Or is the speed of such change beyond the scope of impacting the current monopoly anti-trust conversations?
It depends on who is paying their bills. They always had more money than they collected from law students. By contrast ACS was almost entirely funded by the students. The Democratic Party orgs were the real counterweight at my law school back in the 2010's.