Category: Regulation

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Annals of American Decline Despair Regulation World

Congestion Pricing Is Just the Latest in Progressives’ Betrayal of the Regulatory State

Once upon a time, most ways into New York City were tolled. Then the original progressive movement hit. Progressive economists like Harold Hotelling argued persuasively that because the marginal cost of running another motorist over a bridge was near zero, there was no economic reason for which everyone who wanted to drive over the bridge should not be allowed to do so. The way to recover the vast fixed costs of bridge construction was not by charging a toll, but by extracting contributions from motorists that would not discourage them from using the bridge whenever they wanted to do so. And the way to do that was to tax them, regardless how much they actually used the bridge.

This solution to funding infrastructure construction — taxation combined with free access — was a regulatory solution, and not just any kind of regulatory solution, but a rate regulatory solution, because the government chose to set the price of infrastructure access: only you could easily miss it, because the government set that price at zero.

In this way, the original progressive approach to roads and bridges was not different from the progressives’ approach to markets of all kinds, which was to regulate terms of sale with social justice in mind. Thus the government in this period encouraged AT&T to recoup its own fixed costs by charging high prices to wealthy long-distance users, freeing the company up to provide local calling services, which were used more heavily by the poor, at very low rates. And the government forced the railroads to recoup more of their fixed costs from intercity routes used by the wealthy, even though competition would typically have held prices down for those customers, and to use the savings to charge lower prices to rural customers.

The progressives’ approach to regulating roads and bridges though a combination of taxation and zero price access was socially just, too, because of course it meant that city driving was free for everyone.

Then, for reasons that remain unclear, progressives seemed to forget what the entire regulatory project was all about, and in the stunningly short space of three years in the late 1970s, they collaborated with conservatives to tear down most of the regulatory state at the federal level. They deregulated the airlines, trucking, railroads, and natural gas. And in ensuring decades the federal government stopped regulating banking, and telecom rates as well.

One might have thought that the resurgence of the progressive movement in recent years would have led to a rediscovery of the original progressive model of price and quality regulation, but instead the movement has seemed time and again to mistake policies that the original progressives fought bitterly to overcome for progressive solutions to today’s problems. This has played out to a farcical extreme in the recent progressive love affair with the antitrust laws, which promote the unrestrained competition that the progressives fought so hard to overcome through the regulatory model.

And it is sadly in evidence now too in the progressive love affair with congestion pricing, which amounts to no more than reimposing the toll system that the original progressives fought so hard to take down. To be sure, the original progressives missed something important about roads: they congest, and they pollute. So Hotelling was wrong to assume that the marginal cost of allowing another driver to cross a bridge would always be near zero. That cost stays near zero until the bridge reaches the optimal level of congestion, after which point the cost of adding another car to the bridge is very high indeed.

But the solution to the problem of congestion isn’t to start charging users a price for access. That just takes us back to the bad old days when being poor meant you lost your right, even, to access that most quintessential of public spaces, the streets. The solution is to ration access to the streets using a criterion that isn’t tied so closely to wealth. And technology makes that easier to do today than it ever has been.

I’ve argued that one approach would be for the city to use a smartphone app to decide who gets access based on a combination of first-come-first-served and proximity to public transportation. You could log in from the comfort of home, the app would decide whether the city can accommodate you based on current traffic conditions and whether you are near a subway, and you would instantaneously receive an authorization to proceed or a request to go into town by other means that day. A colleague has suggested to me that those with jobs in the city should get priority.

Regardless how the rationing mechanism might be structured, the point is that price — and its sinister correlation with wealth — doesn’t need to play any role. Nor should it, unless you are so naive as to believe that those who are willing to pay more are always those who can put the streets to more productive use, rather than simply those for whom a dollar isn’t worth as much as it is to others, because they happen to have more of them.

What’s so troubling about the progressive embrace of congestion pricing is that progressives don’t seem to care about the classist consequences, setting today’s progressives rather starkly apart from the originals. Instead, today’s progressives view the price system as the solution not just to big city traffic, but climate change more generally — in the form of the carbon tax. What they don’t seem to understand is that there is no magic to price when it comes to rationing access to resources that are in fixed supply, like city streets, or air. Price is just another ration card, just another way of deciding who takes and who doesn’t. Only unlike other rationing mechanisms, price gives the rich priority.

Why would progressives ever opt, among the myriad criteria to use in sorting those who get to take and those who do not, to choose the one that selects for wealth? This approach may of course be self defeating — the gilets jaunes movement that almost toppled the French government consisted of poor people aggrieved by a gas tax aimed at fighting climate change, a tax that the government was forced to withdraw.

But even if reliance on price rationing doesn’t prove a political loser, it’s still socially unjust. Why should the poor bear the burden of saving the world’s climate? Yes, under carbon taxes and congestion pricing, the rich do end up paying, but they also end up getting to drive. The poor might end up better off, if some of the proceeds of the tax are redistributed to them, but they still won’t get to drive. Why? Because if they were to benefit so richly from redistribution of tax proceeds, or from exemptions designed to temper the effects of the tax, that they were still able to access the streets as much as the rich, why, then the carbon tax wouldn’t actually reduce emissions after all!

It is this sort of seemingly naive betrayal of the regulatory state, and the civic values that it stood for, by those who ought to be sticking up for those values, that makes the current progressive movement a shadow of the original.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

The Big and the Bad

That firm size tells us little about propensity to innovate is nicely illustrated by contrasting AT&T and Verizon with Amazon. AT&T and Verizon have rightly been criticized for what looks like intentional underinvestment in broadband, made possible by their oligopoly power. Comes now Amazon, planning to invest billions to provide global broadband access via satellite, and Google, investing billions to build new undersea internet cables.

The big can do wrong, but they can also do right.

There is a Schumpeterian lesson here too. Schumpeter argued that market power is always in jeopardy from outside the market, and that is in evidence here. Who would have thought a few years ago that an online retailer would one day plan to use the profits generated from dominance in its own market to challenge the vicious telecom oligopoly?

It should also be clear that a broken up Amazon or Google, an Amazon or Google confined to one business, one market, and one level of the supply chain, would have neither the capital, nor the ambition, nor the legal right to attack the telecoms.

It is not size that is a problem, but the misuse of size, and the remedy for misuse is to encourage the good uses and suppress the bad. Which is to say: not to break up, but to regulate.

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Antitrust Meta Monopolization Regulation

Chicxulubian Antitrust

There is a lot for industrial policy, including antitrust, to gain from reflecting upon evolution. Consider, for example, the theory that the demise of the dinosaurs in a catastrophic meteor impact at Chicxulub cleared the way for mammals to become the world’s dominant megafauna.

If we suppose that mammals are better creatures than dinosaurs — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — then the theory suggests that until the meteor impact the dinosaurs had short-circuited competition from mammals, preventing them from leveraging their superiority to overpower the dinosaurs.

Perhaps the short circuit was the mere fact of dinosaurs’ incumbency. Mammals couldn’t reach livestock size, for example, and compete with larger dinosaurs, simply because dinosaurs already occupied that niche, denying mammals the resources they would need to evolve into it. Similarly, antitrust and innovation economics have long recognized that there are first-mover advantages that can block competition. Indeed, the argument current today that Google and Facebook use their size to acquire startups before they can grow into serious competitors resembles the role dinosaurs’ incumbency may have played in obstructing the development of mammals.

But perhaps instead of confirming our fears about the anticompetitive character of incumbency, the story of dinosaurs and mammals undermines it. For there is no reason to assume that mammals really are the better — more advanced, more sophisticated, somehow — of the two groups. Perhaps if the advantages of incumbency could be eliminated, and dinosaurs and mammals, in fully-developed form, could be set against each other, dinosaurs would emerge victorious.

In that case the meteor impact did not operate the way some believe that using the antitrust laws to break up Big Tech would operate today. The cataclysm did not free up space for more innovative upstarts to develop and occupy the ecosystem, but rather wiped out a more advanced form, allowing less-developed upstarts to thrive, and then to turn around and use the advantages of incumbency to prevent the more advanced form from returning to its original position of dominance. The meteor laid low the dinosauric epitome of life, and mammals leapt into the space and prevented dinosaurs from coming back. It is hard, when looking at the dinosaurs’ descendants, the birds, with their obsession with beauty, long-term amorous relationships, and increasingly-well-documented intelligence, not to wonder what might have been.

In other words, there is no reason for industrial policymakers to suppose that periodically shaking up the business world using the industrial cataclysm of the deconcentration order must necessarily, through competition, lead to better firms. Some value judgment must be made by policymakers regarding whether what will come next promises to be better than what we have now. Competition is path dependent, a kind of roll of the dice, and there is no guarantee that a new roll will produce better forms than the last. The evolution of the mammals into man — an unmitigated disaster for the global ecosystem — stands as Exhibit One to that sorry fact.

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Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

Boeing Shows Us Why Prices Are Too Important for Private Enterprise to Decide Alone

The sad tale of Boeing’s pricing of essential safety features for the 737 MAX 8 as product options is an object lesson in why pricing should always be a public-private project.

Many firms engage in price discrimination: charging different prices for the same product. The ideal way to do that is to generate reliable information on the willingness of each customer to pay, and then to charge higher prices to those willing to pay more and lower prices to those willing to pay less. But often firms can’t just discriminate in prices directly, either because discriminatory pricing would be politically sensitive, or because firms just don’t know how much buyers are willing to pay. So firms discriminate indirectly, by splitting the product into a base model and then selling optional additions.

By pricing the additions far above the actual incremental cost of adding the addition onto the product, the firm can seduce buyers into bringing price discrimination upon themselves. The buyer who is relatively price insensitive — and therefore has a high willingness to pay — will load up on options, and end up paying a far higher total price for the product than will the price-sensitive buyers, who will go with the base model. If this sounds like the business model of the car industry, that’s because car makers — particularly GM — pioneered this form of covert price discrimination in the mid-20th century.

Is covert price discrimination of this kind good for the economy? If a firm’s overhead is so high that the firm would not be able to cover costs, including overhead costs, at a competitive uniform price, then the answer may be yes. But if not, then price discrimination represents a pure redistribution of wealth from consumers to firms, by allowing firms to raise prices higher than necessary, to those consumers who happen to be willing to pay more.

Boeing’s decision to charge pilots extra to be able to read data from a key sensor used by an anti-stall system in the 737 MAX 8 is a classic example of covert price discrimination. The cost of enabling pilots to read data off the sensor was apprently near zero, but Boeing charged airlines thousands of dollars for that option in order to coax airlines with a higher willingness to pay to pay more for a 737 MAX 8. Predictably, budget airlines, like Lion Air, whose 737 MAX 8 crashed on takeoff, possibly because pilots could not read data off of the sensor, and therefore did not know that the plane’s anti-stall system was malfunctioning, did not choose that option.

If America had a general price regulator — an administrative agency responsible for approving the prices charged by large American businesses, including Boeing — then that regulator would be able to tell us today whether Boeing really needed to price discriminate in order to cover overhead, and therefore whether the high price Boeing charged for that safety option really was justified by its costs. Or whether Boeing’s price discrimination amounted to the charging of above-cost prices — prices that redistribute wealth from consumers to firms, not because the extra wealth is required to make the firm ready, willing, and able to produce, not because the extra wealth is necessary to give investors a reasonable return on their investment, but simply because Boeing, as a member of a two-firm global airplane production duopoly (along with Airbus), had the market power to raise price. And because Boeing thought it had more of a right to airline profits — and ultimately to the hard-earned cash of consumers — than do the airlines that buy planes from Boeing and the consumers that fly on them. If it turns out that the safety option was priced higher to extract monopoly profits from consumers, rather than to cover overhead, then we have in Boeing an example of how market power can inflict not just harm on the pocketbook, but actually take lives.

The existence of a general price regulator would have allowed us to pass judgment on Boeing, because what price regulators do is to extract information from big businesses about their costs, including overhead, and based on that to determine whether these firms need to engage in price discrimination to survive, and if so, how much price discrimination is required to cover costs. Regulators then approve price discrimination — called “demand-based pricing” in regulator-speak — if it is needed to cover costs, and reject it where it amounts to no more than an exercise of monopoly power.

Because we have no price regulation of airline production, we simply have no way of telling for sure what Boeing was doing when it decided to charge more for the safety option.

Indeed, the advantage of having a rate regulatory agency goes deeper than just ensuring that firms deploy price discrimination only when it is absolutely necessary to cover costs. Rate regulators have a long history of using their power to approve prices to insist that firms structure their covert price discrimination in a way that is maximally beneficial to consumers. That includes insisting that when firms break their products into base models and sets of options, they do so with a view to safety. Indeed, one of the great benefits of rate regulation is government say over what constitutes an acceptable product. When the airlines were regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, for example, the regulator insisted that the airlines maximize the number of direct flights they offer, with the result that today’s layover hell was largely unknown to mid-century fliers.

Boeing has an incentive to make safety features optional, because high willingness-to-pay airlines are more likely to cough up for safety options. But the extra profits that go to Boeing from being able to price discriminate against wealthy airlines come at the cost of delivery of unsafe planes to budget carriers. A rate regulator might well have insisted that that Boeing’s definition of a base aircraft model include far more safety features than it does today.

Of course, the Federal Aviation Administration, which has authority over flight safety, could have mandated that airlines purchase the optional safety features, but chose not to do so. But a rate regulator would have added an additional regulatory safety net, making it possible to stop dangerous pricing at the source — when the prices are chosen — rather than when airlines make decisions about which options to buy, as the FAA would have done.

Given that aircraft manufacturing prices are not regulated today, is our only option to throw up our hands in despair? No. We can still at least get to the bottom of the question whether Boeing priced that option as an exercise of monopoly power, or out of a need to cover costs, through the unlikely vehicle of the antitrust laws. I have argued that the Sherman Act should be read to provide a right of action to any buyer to sue for a judicial determination whether a firm is charging above-cost, and therefore unnecessarily high, prices.

Now would be the perfect time for the world’s airlines to bring that antitrust case.

Categories
Antitrust Deliberate acts against interest Monopolization Regulation

Amazon, MFNs, and Second-Best Antitrust

Antitrust advocates are hailing Amazon’s decision to stop requiring third-party sellers to offer products on Amazon at the lowest prices they charge for their products anywhere. But the decision is decidedly second-best: consumers would be much better off were government to regulate Amazon’s fees, and allow the platform to keep those “most-favored-nation” (MFN) rules.

The elimination of MFNs, argue antitrust experts, will promote competition between Amazon and other ecommerce platforms, by allowing third-party sellers to pass on savings to consumers from doing business on lower-fee platforms. If Barnes & Noble, for example, charges a bookseller less to sell books on the Barnes & Noble website, the bookseller will now be free to charge a lower price for its books on the Barnes & Noble website than the seller charges for the same books on Amazon. That in turn will drive business to the Barnes & Noble website, giving Barnes & Noble a reward for lowering its fees and innovating in cost reduction.

That would be the right way to think about MFNs, if the choice were only between laissez faire and antitrust. But there is in fact a third option, which strictly dominates both of the others. Namely, to regulate Amazon’s fees. If Amazon were required to obtain federal government approval of the fees it charges third-party sellers for use of its platform, then regulators could insist on low fees, and even force Amazon to innovate in cost reduction by mandating fees that are below current costs (preventing Amazon from turning a profit unless it innovates). That would unleash all of the benefits that greater competition between platforms promises to provide.

But it would also preserve advantages that platform competition simply cannot offer. Consumers, after all, like knowing that the price they get on Amazon is the best price available anywhere for the product. Anyone who has wasted hours on one travel website after another trying to find the best airfare knows how much time and effort is required to get the best price when such guarantees do not exist.

Indeed, through MFNs, Amazon effectively leveraged its size to impose a law of one price for consumer products across the internet, and that had huge consumer benefits. Amazon is so big that virtually all products of any interest to consumers are sold through its website. By imposing MFNs, Amazon ensured that consumers wouldn’t need to engage in wasteful and time-consuming searches for the best internet prices when they went to buy online. By going to Amazon, consumers could be sure to find any product available on the internet at the best possible price. Amazon used its size to make life easy for consumers, by turning the internet into a one-stop shop.

We must think of Amazon’s MFNs as accomplishing something that we might ideally want a government regulator to accomplish: making it impossible for anyone, anywhere on the internet, to get ripped off by being charged a higher price for a product than a price available for the same product somewhere else. The MFNs, in other words, were an internet-wide guarantee against price discrimination, that nemesis of all consumer welfare.

While the MFNs did prevent third-party sellers from passing the gains from buying on cheaper platforms on to consumers, the MFNs’ elimination of price discrimination was also valuable to consumers. To give but one example, consider that price discriminating firms frequently use search costs to distinguish between high and low willingness to pay buyers: they offer lower prices only to those who signal their inability to pay more by engaging in wasteful searches for better prices. The poor must clip coupons to get lower prices — or waste time searching for better prices on seller websites or obscure platforms — whereas the rich sail through checkout lines. The MFNs spared consumers such indignities.

Their demise undermines the public benefit of one internet price that Amazon was able to provide to consumers thanks to the firm’s size. And that’s why government regulation of Amazon’s fees is better than either laissez faire or the antitrust solution of simply eliminating the MFNs.

A fee-regulated Amazon would be unable to take advantage of the MFNs to charge higher fees, or to fail to continue to invest in innovations that would reduce the cost of providing platform services, thus the concerns about MFNs that antitrust and competition policy are intended to address would also be addressed by fee regulation. But fee regulation would not require elimination of the MFNs, and would therefore preserve the huge benefits to consumers that come from the guarantee of always being able to find the lowest internet price in one place: Amazon.

Thus fee regulation would realize all of the benefits of competition, while inflicting none of the costs on consumers. As in so many areas, we must therefore understand the antitrust victory here to be only relative at best. Society might be better off as a result of the demise of Amazon’s MFNs, but only if the gains to consumers in the form of more platform competition happen to outweigh the losses to consumers from the demise of the guarantee of one internet price and the associated return of price discrimination. But even if society is rendered better off by the demise of the MFNs, it certainly is not rendered as much better off as it would be were policymakers simply to step in to regulate Amazon’s fees and allow MFNs, and the Internet of one price, to prevail.

Antitrust is a decidedly second-best policy here.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Regulation

The Original Progressive View of Antitrust

Much of the popular discussion of the trust question has proceeded upon the assumption that trusts are the result of some sort of immoral conduct which should be made illegal. But the same facts which led to the grant of exclusive franchises (legal monopolies) in the case of local public utilities, have led also to a belief that many of the monopolies which have grown without formal legal grant may likewise be beneficial if subjected to proper public control. The courts in this country, as well as many economists who specialize on “trusts,” have long since come to the conclusion that the anti-trust laws, even if desirable, do not in all cases furnish a sufficient solution of the monopoly problem, and that accordingly governmental price-fixing may be a desirable supplement. But neither the courts nor the teachers of “trusts” seem fully to realize that the determination of a “fair price” is not a search for some objective fact, but that it involves the adoption of a policy; and that the policy cannot be adopted intelligently without a drastic revision of accepted economic theory as well as the accepted theory of private ownership; and that the officials charged with the formation of the policy must perforce resort to some theory as to the proper distribution of income and as to the channels into which industry should flow.

Robert Lee Hale, Economic Theory and the Statesman, in The Trend of Economics 189, 193 (Rexford Guy Tugwell, ed., 1924).

Commentators regard the [Alcoa] case as one of the most powerful statements in antitrust jurisprudence for the robust efforts to constrain dominant firms. Discussions of the case often place [eminent progressive jurist] Learned Hand at the center of attention and ascribe to Hand the views espoused in the court’s decision. Hand believed otherwise. He disliked the antitrust laws from his earliest days in public life. In a representative statement of his views, Hand wrote to a friend in 1914:

“I do not agree by any means that the Sherman Act is of value or that the progressive party should take its position against monopoly. . . . I have always suspected that there are monopolies possible which depend for their maintenance wholly upon economic efficiency and which it would be an economic blunder to destroy.”

. . .

In a separate memorandum [in the Alcoa case], Learned Hand noted: “There are two possible ways of dealing with [monopolies]: to regulate, or to forbid, them. Since we have no way of regulating them [because regulatory legislation has not been put into place], we forbid them. I don’t think much of that way, but I didn’t set it up; and now the ordinary run of our fellow-citizens — some, even of the ‘rugged individualists’ — regard the Sherman Act as the palladium of their liberties.”

Andrew I. Gavil et al., Antitrust Law in Perspective 475, 477 (3d ed. 2017).
Categories
Antitrust Regulation

Back to Atomic Laissez Faire

Lest we forget that deregulation was a project of the left, not just the right, here is Marxist legal historian Morton Horwitz in 1984:

Almost nothing in the antitrust debates supports what would soon become Theodore Roosevelt’s new conservative distinction between “good trusts” and “bad.” Roosevelt was operating under a newly emerging view that corporate concentration could be justified by economic efficiency-increasing returns to scale. Only corporations that achieved dominance through illicit means-financial manipulation or unfair competition-were “bad” trusts. By contrast, the old conservatives who passed the Sherman Act did not believe that the neoclassical economic law of diminishing returns had been repealed. [B]igness was per se bad. From their perspective, large-scale economic concentration was inherently illicit because, according to economic laws, there was no way corporations could legitimately achieve overwhelming economic dominance. Almost nothing in the Sherman Act debates suggests that economic concentration could be justified on efficiency grounds. That was for a later day.

. . .

The regulatory state, originally conceived as a means of checking corporate power, has gradually become discredited. In most cases deregulation now means that corporate power will simply be left unchecked. The original Progressive conception of the state as the means to our salvation must be fundamentally reconsidered. Without the sort of decentralized institutions that the old conservatives (and Progressives like Brandeis) supported, we seem destined to fluctuate between deregulation and its somewhat less overtly rapacious and more noble sounding sibling, regulation. Deregulation generally means unrestrained corporate control. Regulation frequently means more subtle, more disguised, and often more effective forms of corporate control.

Morton J. Horwitz, Progressive Legal Historiography, 63 Or. L. Rev. 679, 686 (1984).

Curiously, Horwitz’s position is today fast becoming the mainstream, bipartisan position on markets. Thus, to borrow Horwitz’s schema, we have come full circle, from the old conservative vision of antitrust-defended, laissez-faire markets of atomized sellers, to the new conservative/Progressive consensus on the importance of size, to the triumph of the Progressive accommodation with size in the form of New Deal rate regulation, to the triumph of the new conservative accommodation with size in the form of deregulation and Chicago School antitrust, to today’s gathering return to the old conservative rejection of size and embrace of an antitrust-defended atomized laissez faire. Ah me.

Categories
Regulation

Begging Markets

In a world in which there were no government, firms would be forced by competition to do things that are bad for the world, that even the firms themselves realize are bad and do not really want to do, and our only hope for salvation would be that firms choose not to do those things, to suffer the punishment of the markets, to martyr themselves for society.

But of course there is a government, and government can put an end to whatever it wants. We do not need to rely on the good graces of the business world.

If you forget this — forget that there is a government — because you have worshiped so long at the altar of the free market, then you find yourself insisting on absurd things. Such as that CEOs ought, out of the goodness of their hearts, and with all the incentives pulling to the contrary, to start making socially just decisions:

Automating work is a choice, of course, one made harder by the demands of shareholders, but it is still a choice. And even if some degree of unemployment caused by automation is inevitable, these executives can choose how the gains from automation and A.I. are distributed, and whether to give the excess profits they reap as a result to workers, or hoard it for themselves and their shareholders.

Live by the market, despair by the market.

Categories
Antitrust Regulation

Flying 20/20

Frank Lorenzo, head of Texas International Airlines:

[I]f the Aviation Act of 1975[, which deregulated the airlines,] goes into effect, we will, over a period of years, end up with a couple of very large airlines. There will be many small airlines that will start up here and there, but they will never amount to a very significant amount of the transportation market. The smaller certificated airlines like Texas International[, which was acquired in 1982 by Continental Airlines, which itself merged with United in 2010,] will shortly become history. The operating and financial advantages will go to the large carriers with substantial resources, and to very small carriers that temporarily have lower labor costs, primarily because they are non-unionized.

Quoted in Richard H.K. Vietor, Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America 54 (1994).

In 1978, when Congress deregulated the airline industry, there were 10 airlines that provided scheduled national and international service, and those 10 accounted for 90 percent of the domestic marketplace. Today, [in 2016,] there are four major airlines and a few smaller ones providing comparable service, and the four major airlines provide 80 percent of U.S. domestic flights.

Paula W. Render, The Airlines Industry, Concentration and Allegations of Collusion, Competition Policy International (June 14, 2016).
Categories
Antitrust Regulation

Slouching toward Reregulation

There is one solution to the monopoly problem that is conspicuously absent from Noah Smith’s account of monopoly power debates at this year’s ASSA.

Smith rightly concludes that breaking up big firms is not a perfect solution to the monopoly problem. (He thinks, incorrectly, in my view, that breakup is too hard; the real reason not to break up big firms is that they are often more efficient than small ones.) And he rightly gives a list of alternatives to breaking big firms up, including unions, minimum wage laws, putting workers on corporate boards, and imposing tougher labor standards on large firms than small. But he doesn’t seem to see where all of these alternatives point.

Where do minimum wage laws and applying tougher labor standards to large firms point?

To rate regulation, of course. To that approach to governing the market that once — in the decades following World War Two — stretched from securities brokerage to railroads to telephones to airlines.

In a regulated industry, a government administrative agency dictates prices and performance standards to the privately-owned firms that compete in the market. Applying tougher labor standards to firms with monopoly power, a proposal that Smith attributes to Nick Hanauer, is a shade of the old rate regulation, which was often imposed on monopolized industries, such as telephone service, to restrain the power of large firms.

Minimum wage laws are themselves a form of blunt price regulation, blunt because they are imposed on a one-off basis by legislatures instead of by expert administrative agencies with authority to revise the prices dynamically in response to changing circumstances. And both unionization and putting workers on corporate boards are even blunter forms of rate regulation, in that they hope that by increasing the bargaining power of workers, workers will succeed at negotiating the higher wages and better working conditions that a regulator would be empowered to impose by fiat.

True, most of Smith’s proposals are aimed at softening the consequences of labor market monopsony, whereas rate regulation was generally aimed at softening the consequences of consumer market monopoly. But there’s no reason why the Department of Labor couldn’t apply the tenets of rate regulation to labor markets.

Rate regulation is the most developed form of intervention in markets, one that encompasses all the other forms, but also goes beyond them, so it’s the natural choice for achieving just market-level distributions of wealth where unregulated markets fail to do so. A rate regulator can unionize an industry if the regulator wishes, just as the ICC effectively cartelized long-haul railroads to stabilize their prices: the regulator simply insists on approving only a wage tariff that is uniform for all workers, effectively forcing workers to bargain collectively with their employers. But a rate regulator can do more than that, regulating market entry to strike a balance between job security and competitiveness, insisting that workers offer certain bundles of skills, and even imposing workplace safety and benefits standards.

Once we start to believe that markets are failing, and that just breaking up big firms won’t achieve distributively fair market outcomes, as economists seem to be concluding, the door is open to market intervention, and at that point it makes sense to use the best tool for the job. The one-off ad hockery of minimum wages won’t do. Nor will strengthening unions — if you make them strong enough to really succeed, you make them strong enough to oppress investors and consumers. What you need is a politically accountable agency empowered to make markets work for all market participants.

That’s what rate regulation was, and could be again. Let’s stride to it, not slouch.