The American Economic Liberties Project Hurts Small Businesses | The American Spectator

To call the current crop of so-called progressive Democrats “far left” is in many cases an understatement! Especially on matters of lawfare and antitrust, Joe Biden’s presidency was one of the most radical in American history.

Team Biden sued just about every company you can think of: John Deere, Visa, JetBlue, and no fewer than 40 percent of the firms under the S&P market cap! It was all part of a concerted strategy to assert government power under the guise of fighting so-called “big business.”

Thankfully the Trump administration is changing course — and the stock market has rallied as a sign of confidence — but one Washington interest group is determined to keep carrying the Biden torch.

At first blush, the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP) appears to espouse common sense populism. It supports challenging “concentrated economic power” and “monopolies’ dominance over markets and society” through government investigations and antitrust enforcement.

But as always, the devil is in the details. The AELP was founded and led for years by Sarah Miller, a former senior advisor to Lina Khan.

Khan was the head of Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and, while she was good on going after true monopolies, like Big Tech and Live Nation, she was also arguably the most anti-business figure in the recent American history, responsible for launching most of its harassing lawsuits against American companies. She often seemed to punish them merely for existing.

Almost every case she filed lost in court.

Yes, the Trump administration wants to be tough against monopolies, but it doesn’t want to be seen as an agent that’s reflexively against capitalism, or worse — a perennial court loser. As we all know, the president hates losers!

At the core of one of the company’s recent tirades against the Trump administration for rescinding one anti-business case is AELP’s support for the Robinson-Patman Act. Passed in 1936 back when FDR was president and rotary phones were cutting-edge technology, Robinson-Patman prohibits businesses from lowering prices for “preferred customers.”

Robinson-Patman was part of a suite of Great Depression-era reforms meant to ensure small shops could compete with the then-new phenomenon of big chains. That sounds good in theory but in practice it’s a minefield of lawsuits and disincentives for stores to pass on savings to the consumer lest they run afoul of litigious antitrust enforcers.

There’s a reason most economists have left Robinson-Patman for dead and the government largely stopped enforcing it in the 1970s. In trying to protect the mom-and-pop shop, it raises prices for the consumer.

Knowledgeable economists understand this isn’t a zero-sum game: it’s possible to have both low prices and competitive small businesses. Yet the AELP thinks we need to cut off our nose to spite our face. The predictable results will be higher prices, the end of rewards and loyalty programs that benefit families, and power shifted not to the consumer but trial lawyers and D.C. bureaucrats.

Small businesses don’t need endless legal crusading against Walmart and Amazon. Many small businesses rely on Walmart and Amazon — the AELP’s entire understanding of how an economy works is reductionist and outmoded.

What small businesses need is the ability to compete with Walmart and Amazon by being faster, more flexible, more specialized, and more in tune with their local communities. In other words, they need less red tape and federal interference, the opposite of what the AELP seeks.

What the AELP really wants is to demonize businesses simply for being successful. Through their eyes, tech companies like Google and Facebook that helped small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic “inspire terror.” Southwest Airlines’ lowering airfares so middle-class families could afford to take vacations amounted to “predatory pricing.”

The AELP is right about this much: “Over the last several decades, small business formation in the U.S. has plummeted, harming economic growth and local economies.” But that’s because federal regulations are strangling companies, costing them an astonishing $300 billion per year, throwing up major barriers to financially vulnerable start-ups.

If Donald Trump wants to give small businesses a better deal, he should start by downsizing Washington so they can breathe. He should, in other words, ignore what the AELP is telling him.

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