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Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. To them, big is always bad except, of course, when it comes to the size and scope of government. The same people who supposedly fear the concentration of power in the marketplace celebrate the concentration of power in the State--a State that asserts itself into and nullifies private contracts, breaks up companies it deems too large, and inflicts punishment on those who succeed in the competition for customers. In short, antitrust seeks to cap the amount of success any company or business can enjoy and the benefits reaped by customers.

As economist Yale Brozen wrote, antitrust law seems to say that firms should compete but should not win; firms should be efficient enough to survive but should not share the fruits of greater efficiency with their customers.

And that is the fatal defect of antitrust policy.

Antitrust fails to accept the lessons of economic history that voluntary exchange is a win-win proposition and that consumers are incredibly powerful in a free market system. A company that continues to reward its customers with superior products and innovations will, in turn, be rewarded with greater market share--with more--and will do better than their competitors and they will grow in size. Size is not necessarily a bad thing. The size of a business reflects its ability to please its consumers.

But no company can achieve a strong position in the market and rest on its laurels. Consumers are too demanding, and competitors will arise to steal customers away from any firm that ceases to treat its clients well. Unlike players in the marketplace who must take note of consumer trends to survive, antitrust enforcers often fail to see what it is that is right in front of their faces.

Just take the issue of video services. In 2005, when Netflix was already several years old and growing in popularity, the FTC--believe it or not--busied itself in blocking a merger between Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. So this is the inside of government. Netflix is beginning to take off, and the antitrust busters--the trust busters-- are breaking up VCR companies and DVD companies. They are going after Blockbuster. This is the incompetence of government, and we should not encourage this. Blockbuster and Hollywood Video no longer exist. Even now, Netflix is one they are worried about. So Netflix was the competitor that put Blockbuster out of business. They wanted to get Blockbuster in order to forbid them from merging. It makes no sense at all.

No such fear exists today, though, that Netflix will be a monopoly since they are competing with Hulu, Peacock, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV, Paramount+, and others, but 5 or 6 years ago, you might have thought: Netflix is going to take over the world, that we have got to break them up. No. If companies please their consumers, let them get bigger. Bigger means they are giving their customers something they want.

We didn't need government to break up Netflix. We didn't need government to interfere to ensure competition and innovation. All we needed to do was to let the marketplace work, but standing in the way of the benefits of the market are the antitrust zealots. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has pointed out that enacting this bill would stymie legitimate business transactions between sectors and industries, create needless new bureaucracy, and spur unwarranted litigation.

The package is even more nefarious than that. It will take money out of the productive sector--the private sector--and give it to bureaucrats in Washington. As Americans for Tax Reform correctly points out, this legislation would give the Biden administration hundreds of millions of dollars in new funds to pursue a progressive social agenda. They are talking about critical race theory and all of this craziness and injecting this into whether a company can merge or not. This is not something we need to give them more money to do; we need to give them less money.

The package of bills here is just the first step to reinvigorating antitrust law. There is no lack of bills designed to empower government control over the marketplace. Take just one bill called the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, which would presume that any merger of a certain size violates the law and shifts the burden of proof to the merging parties. The government doesn't have to prove that your merging and becoming bigger is bad; you have to prove that your merging is somehow a benefit. People merge--they get bigger--to provide a lower cost and gain market share to gain profit for the consumers. That is what capitalism is based on. That is what Adam Smith really wrote about.

According to Robert Bork, Jr., the antitrust bill would enact so many potential ways to prosecute, abuse, and torment companies that government would, in essence, become the real board of directors, and every major company would be ruled by the Federal Government.

That is what is coming. That is what they are proposing. This bill today is a small step in that direction, but what they have in the pipeline is more government control of business. The package today is a mere precursor to designating the Department of Justice and the FTC as the central planners of the American economy. This bill seeks to take the power out of the hands of the consumers and hand it to the antitrust bureaucrats.

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