Opinion: Trump’s FTC Is Putting American Companies Last – Stephen Moore

President Donald Trump’s record as the deregulation president is nearly unparalleled. In his first 100 days in office, he has already identified hundreds of billions of dollars of potential deregulation savings in the areas of energy, education and housing.

Hooray.

But some of his new regulators in the Justice Department and at the Federal Trade Commission apparently didn’t get the memo. The new FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, is pushing forward with lawsuits — some left over from the Biden administration — that could hobble U.S. businesses.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Former President Joe Biden’s antitrust warriors, led by the notorious super-regulator Lina Khan saw a monopoly in any business that dared make a healthy profit.

She tied into knots dozens of iconic American companies — from banks to credit card companies to our globally dominant tech sector — with harassment lawsuits. She even cheered on European regulators when they brought hostile legal actions against U.S. companies.

In most cases, there was scant evidence of price gouging or any harm to consumers. In most cases the prices for their products were FALLING.

The Trump FTC so far has been as active on antitrust actions as Biden’s. The FTC just recently blocked a $14 billion merger between Hewlett Packard and Juniper Networks. The efficiency gains from mergers and acquisitions are one proven source of efficiency gains by American businesses.

The law firm Mayer Brown recently reported to their clients that the “Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division said this month that they will continue to use Biden-era merger guidelines, contrary to predictions that the Trump administration would relax antitrust enforcement.”

Google is fighting three separate antitrust lawsuits for uncompetitive pricing/advertising practices. They are supposedly harming consumers.

Really? The consumer surplus provided by Google is estimated to be in the multitrillions of dollars. Google invests $40 billion a year on research and development while employing tens of thousands of Americans at six- and seven-figure salaries.

Meta is accused of driving up online advertising costs. The cost of online advertising has gone DOWN by more than 25% — more than newspaper and TV advertisements.

Similarly, Uber faces cutthroat competition from Lyft as well as local taxi services in major cities that are adopting similar speedy cost-competitive pickup and delivery technology.

“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people,” Ferguson boasted in a press release. It’s not clear which American people he’s talking about, because most of us love using Google and Uber and Facebook.

On balance, the only people who benefit from antitrust enforcement are lawyers. But that may be only partly true. The other huge beneficiaries are the Chinese, who might as well be hiring Ferguson as a secret agent to do their bidding.

Can anyone imagine regulators in Japan bringing antitrust lawsuits against Honda, or Beijing suing Alibaba for anticompetitive behavior?

For our own government to hogtie great American companies with frivolous multibillion-dollar lawsuits is the height of economic masochism.

Trump should fire the whole lot at the Justice Department and the FTC, and hire people who will deregulate, not reregulate, the marketplace.