“The [Trump] Justice Department filed its much-anticipated lawsuit to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner, signaling the end of the Obama era of antitrust and the beginning of the Trump era,” writes Breitbart News.
So is President Trump right or wrong to block the attempted merger of AT&T and Time Warner?
I reject the premise of the question. The premise of the question is that it’s President Trump’s to decide. It isn’t – or at least, it should not be.
Antitrust laws were the original major expansion of Big Government outside the boundaries of the original U.S. Constitution. Those laws were the beginning of substituting federal government judgment and discretion for what should have been the judgment, discretion and also personal responsibility of business owners, stockholders and others acting in the market.
I know there are a thousand reasons to let this merger go through, and there are likewise a thousand reasons to not let the merger go through. None of that matters! It’s up to businesses to make the calls and deal with the consequences.
Politicians—even a non-politician politician such as President Trump—act according to the interests of their constituent groups. Businesses answer to customers. If a business – big or small – makes a wrong call, it suffers in the loss of profits.
The whole antitrust movement, starting back in the 19th Century, was based on the false premise that there are “market failures”. There are no market failures. The market simply does what it does and when actors in the market make errors – defined as something that results in lost profits – those actors (1) pay the price, and (2) make the necessary corrections. If they don’t, they will die, something politicians and bureaucrats will never have to face.
Government, when attempting to act on everyone’s behalf (always a lie), is one gigantic, continuous and prolonged exercise in calibrated failure. The free market, while fallible, learns, grows and corrects itself over time, making things better and better and better. For God’s sake, there’s no comparison! Get government the hell out of the way.
President Trump is a businessman. A lot of people would prefer him making these calls over, say, a professional politician like President Obama who has barely ever even held a job in the private marketplace for his entire life. I get that. But none of it changes the fact that America was once great only because it started out as an unfettered free market, and will only be great again when we take these decisions out of the hands of the federal government, no matter who is running it.
Is President Trump right to block the AT&T/Time Warner merger? I refuse to take a stand. It’s not my call. And it shouldn’t be anyone else’s, either, other than the parties involved.
Please don’t respond and give me reasons why it will hurt some people if the merger goes through. That isn’t the point! There are winners and losers in any business decision or human interaction of nearly any kind. It’s not government’s job to pick who those will be.
If you want to reform the economy, then get government out of the economy. President Trump should spend his energy and power doing that, not getting in the middle of things where no elected official belongs.
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