Musings on Economic Freedom from the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s
Texas recently led a coalition of 15 other states and the U.S. Department of Justice in charging Apple and three of the nation’s largest book publishers with colluding to fix prices in violation of antitrust law. The charge stems from Apple’s work with the publishers to develop alternative distribution channels for ebooks in order to bring the publishers higher prices than they could command through Amazon.
At least two issues arise from this action.
First, it is worth examining whether markets and consumers are helped or harmed by this action. Milton Friedman seemed doubtful of the benefits when he said, “instead of promoting competition, antitrust laws tend to do exactly the opposite.”
Second, there is a legitimate concern in this age of global markets as to what role, if any, states should play in antitrust enforcement. It is possible that even if there are benefits from antitrust laws regulating national and even international markets, an overlapping, multijurisdictional approach to antitrust enforcement might hamper markets and makes them less competitive.
The Foundation is holding a policy primer tomorrow, Tuesday, July 31, at 11:30 to examine what role states should play in this area. The panelist are: J. Bruce McDonald, Partner, Jones Day & Former U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General; Stacie deBlieux, Assistant Attorney General, Louisiana Department of Justice; and Berin Szoka, President, TechFreedom.
Antitrust law is moving to the forefront of the discussion of how to regulate businesses in light of global competition. With Texas being one of the more active states in this sphere, the issue is also of great relevance to the Texas public policy arena. Please join us for an interesting discussion among these three leading experts on the issue as we also celebrate Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday.
This update and all our previous Thinking Economically updates can been viewed under the Related Commentaries heading in the Thinking Economically section of the Foundation’s website. We will be adding automatic subscribe and unsubscribe functionality to this email. In the meantime, if you’d like to do either, please send an email to bpeacock@texaspolicy.com.
Bill
Bill Peacock
Vice President of Research
Director, Center for Economic Freedom
Texas Public Policy Foundation
o: (512) 472-2700
c: (512) 965-6476
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