Trustbusting is as American as apple pie

Author Matt Stoller on why recalling American history can rally people against the corporate tyrannies of Scrooge McDuck

What makes a person truly free? Voting? Being able to speak out politically? Knowing you won’t be punished for your vote?Those are political freedoms, and vital for sure.

But in everyday life, whether or not you feel free may depend on other forces.

Can you leave a company you work at and go work wherever you want? Can you get a refund when an airline cancels that big trip you’ve been saving up for? Can you effectively prevent your kids from using social media apps that make them anxious?

As we discussed with FTC chair Lina Khan not long ago, our freedoms can be as threatened by private corporate actors as they are by public government ones. But all too often we don’t think of what companies do as having anything to do with our freedom, and so we let them do it. Khan and others are trying to change that.

Today we bring you a fascinating interview with one of the intellectual luminaries in the same new wave of anti-monopoly thought and action that Khan belongs to.

Matt Stoller, the research director of the American Economic Liberties Project and editor of the newsletter BIG, has spent his career exploring and exposing the threat of monopoly power for the economy and for democracy itself.

We talked to Stoller about how anti-monopolism is baked into American identity and history, how intellectuals on the left and right disastrously abandoned that tradition in the 1970s and 80s, what newly empowered agencies under the Biden administration are finally doing to turn the tide, and how antitrust politicians can recapture an older idea of what politics should mean in America to make change that people can feel.

It’s a chance to get smart on the history and future of anti-monopolism in the U.S. And it’s a conversation you won’t want to miss.

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When we talked to Lina Khan recently, she told us that she saw antitrust work as democracy work. Can you tell us how you see antitrust as central to democracy?

Fundamentally, a monopoly means control over a market by a small group of people. They have the ability to set the terms and conditions in that market for everyone who buys, sells, or works there. That is coercive governing power, right? Like if you work in the online advertising industry, your boss is Google, maybe Meta. It doesn't matter who you work for. Your boss is actually Google.

So if you're talking about democracy and you leave out all of the markets that we work in and buy and sell things and crops and ideas in, then you've shrunk politics to very symbolic questions. So that's why I think of antitrust. I would broaden it to competition policy, anything that structures markets. Anti-monopolism is not an “issue.” It is a way of seeing the world and a fundamental part of the Anglo-American tradition. 

You can go back to the Statute of Monopolies in the 1620s. You can go back to the English Civil War, which had a lot to do with monopolies. You can go back to the War of 1812, which had to do with British mercantile monopolies. You can go to Frederick Douglass on land monopolies. 

So bring that up to the 20th century. If you look back to the New Deal era, if you look at the decades of legislation since then, we have plenty of laws against the kind of concentration that we are experiencing right now. What happened?

In many of the colonies, the very first laws passed were laws against usury. And when they became states, often those were the first laws they passed. This stuff is very deep-rooted. The idea was, as with checks and balances in the Constitution, we’re going to have checks and balances in our commercial arena. And that's going to be done through competition and localism.