Over a 12 months ago, I wrote that the Biden administration was pushing the “most progressive regulatory triumvirate in recent memory.” Leading the charge was a 30-something leftist academic named Lina Khan. She’s chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and if anything, my initial worries were significantly understated.
It’s fair to say Khan has emerged as probably the most dangerous person in government for those of us who cherish free markets and imagine it’s the very best strategy to grow an economy and help people prosper.
FTC origins
Most Americans probably never heard of Lina Khan or know little concerning the FTC, created greater than a century ago “to research and stop unfair methods of competition, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices affecting commerce.” That’s since it’s just one among many agencies in our alphabet-soup of regulatory oversight that governs the $25 trillion US economy.
But it’s important. Unlike the so-called SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) which monitors Wall Street, or the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) which hands out broadcast licenses, the FTC has authority over nearly any business and industry that falls throughout the scope of its broad mandate.
It could possibly and has tried to stop mergers within the tech industry. It has sanctioned telecom corporations it believed jacked up prices an excessive amount of. It weighed in on net-neutrality debate. It even brought a case involving crypto.
Khan is so left-wing, even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would have issues together with her chairing the FTC.AP
You would like people running the place to be fair-minded — to punish down on real fraud but allow the economy to innovate without fear of presidency reprisals.
After all, Khan wouldn’t buy that argument. As an instructional and congressional staffer, and now on the FTC, she sees the evil of capitalism all over the place including in some pretty benign places. While in law school, she wrote a paper called the “Amazon Antitrust Paradox,” that made her a star in lefty-economic circles.
The media anointed her the nation’s “antitrust hipster” for her allegedly daring assertions that Amazon, the ever-present online retailer, was one way or the other destroying competition (and the country) since it offered a product hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of individuals love. Amazon needed to be stopped in its tracks.
‘Train wreck’
Because Khan was all of 32 years of age and so left-wing that even Chuck Schumer would have issues together with her chairing the FTC, the Biden people first flicked her in as a commissioner.
The media anointed Kahn because the nation’s “antitrust hipster” for her allegedly daring claims that Amazon is one way or the other destroying competition.AP
But once the dust cleared on her Senate confirmation, the White House unilaterally named her chair, blindsiding Schumer and people Republicans who voted for her.
The result has been a train wreck on the FTC. Khan is alleged to be expanding the FTC power beyond court precedent and its congressional authority. Business is definitely feeling the warmth and weighing Khan’s wrath before making any major decision, I’m told. Not precisely the recipe for innovation and economic growth.
On the FTC, there is no such thing as a debate with other commissions on the GOP side that has been customary, and Khan appears to have almost no shame in only how much she’s going to use and a few say abuse her power.
She has written extensively about Big Tech, as an instructional and congressional staffer. She has attacked specific corporations in her past capacities like Amazon and Meta, which owns Facebook. She favors breaking them up, or at the least stopping them from expanding any more.
In those writings she has shown an obvious bias, which is often cause for regulatory recusals. Yet she refuses to accomplish that, particularly in a recent and absurd FTC motion trying to stop Meta from buying the virtual gaming company Inside.
The case was a dud, thrown out by a federal judge.
But more worrisome was Khan’s conduct. The executive code that guides the conduct of our regulatory bureaucracy demands due process for targets and a level of impartiality and fairness among the many people carrying out various actions. That’s one reason why GOP commissioner Christine Wilson dissented within the case.
There was no way Khan could take a look at the matter fairly given her role as an anti-tech activist, Wilson wrote in The Wall Street Journal, as she announced her resignation from the Khan FTC.
That and the agency’s continued “lawlessness” under Khan was an excessive amount of for Wilson to take, she wrote. Too bad Sleepy Joe doesn’t have the identical standards.