{"title":"Antitrust and Equal Liberty","authors":"Kate Jackson","doi":"10.1177/00323292231183825","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"As Robert Bork once asserted, “Antitrust policy cannot be made rational until we are able to give a firm answer to one question: What is the point of the law—what are its goals? Everything else follows from the answer we give.” The appropriate answer, however, is not, as Bork suggested, consumer welfare. Instead, antitrust should serve the equal liberties that citizens give themselves when they engage in economic activity. Given the complexity and interconnectivity of the economy, however, the deliberations in which citizens and policymakers engage will produce a messy cacophony. While leaving the precise content and scope of citizens’ equal liberties open, this article provides a cognitive framework that should nevertheless prove useful as they make sense of the noise. It explains that while business can claim associational freedoms, those freedoms challenge the autonomy of rights of corporate insiders and outsiders alike and should be constrained accordingly. Indeed, this is how citizens have historically understood antitrust—and they can and should do so again.","PeriodicalId":47847,"journal":{"name":"Politics & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":4.1000,"publicationDate":"2023-07-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Politics & Society","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00323292231183825","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"POLITICAL SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
As Robert Bork once asserted, “Antitrust policy cannot be made rational until we are able to give a firm answer to one question: What is the point of the law—what are its goals? Everything else follows from the answer we give.” The appropriate answer, however, is not, as Bork suggested, consumer welfare. Instead, antitrust should serve the equal liberties that citizens give themselves when they engage in economic activity. Given the complexity and interconnectivity of the economy, however, the deliberations in which citizens and policymakers engage will produce a messy cacophony. While leaving the precise content and scope of citizens’ equal liberties open, this article provides a cognitive framework that should nevertheless prove useful as they make sense of the noise. It explains that while business can claim associational freedoms, those freedoms challenge the autonomy of rights of corporate insiders and outsiders alike and should be constrained accordingly. Indeed, this is how citizens have historically understood antitrust—and they can and should do so again.
期刊介绍:
Politics & Society is a peer-reviewed journal. All submitted papers are read by a rotating editorial board member. If a paper is deemed potentially publishable, it is sent to another board member, who, if agreeing that it is potentially publishable, sends it to a third board member. If and only if all three agree, the paper is sent to the entire editorial board for consideration at board meetings. The editorial board meets three times a year, and the board members who are present (usually between 9 and 14) make decisions through a deliberative process that also considers written reports from absent members. Unlike many journals which rely on 1–3 individual blind referee reports and a single editor with final say, the peers who decide whether to accept submitted work are thus the full editorial board of the journal, comprised of scholars from various disciplines, who discuss papers openly, with author names known, at meetings. Editors are required to disclose potential conflicts of interest when evaluating manuscripts and to recuse themselves from voting if such a potential exists.