Earlier this summer, the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a draft update of their Merger Guidelines, “which describe and guide the agencies’ review of mergers and acquisitions to determine compliance with federal antitrust laws.” Maggie Goodlander from the Justice Department joins the podcast to discuss why mergers can weaken competition and harm consumers and workers, and how these proposed guidelines can help bring competition back by making it harder for big corporations to swallow each other up.
Maggie Goodlander is the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice where she oversees the international, appellate, and policy work of the Antitrust Division.
Twitter: @TheJusticeDept
Justice Department And FTC Seek Comment on Draft Merger Guidelines https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
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Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Maggie Goodlander:
Our impetus for revisiting the guidelines this time around was in part the President’s executive order on competition.
Nick Hanauer:
Maggie, I mean, one of the reasons your job is so consequential today is that the country forgot about antitrust for a very long time, didn’t we? You used the term forgotten. It wasn’t forgotten these past 40 years, it’s been ignored.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, that’s right.
Nick Hanauer:
Willfully ignored.
David Goldstein:
That’s right.
Speaker 4:
From the Home Offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. Twice a month, Nick, you deposit some of your dirty Amazon money into my bank account. And so, in a way, both of us, you and I, you a lot more than me, but both of us have benefited from this grotesque monopoly that Jeff Bezos has built. So, this episode we’re doing a little penance.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, a little bit. No, well, A. I sold my Amazon stock, sadly, sadly, before it became the grotesque monopoly that it is.
David Goldstein:
So you could have been a billionaire how many times over?
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. Exactly, if only I had kept it all.
David Goldstein:
Oh, now I feel kind of sorry for you. You need to borrow some money?
Nick Hanauer:
Which brings us to the subject of the day, and one of my favorite parts about the middle out economic program, the Biden administration is litigating, is the third pillar, which is promoting competition. And markets turn out not to be naturally competitive. Markets if left on their own, inevitably concentrate into a winner take all circumstance.
David Goldstein:
Well, that is also what you are taught to do in business schools.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. Exactly.
David Goldstein:
You want to destroy the competition.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
Move fast, break things as Zuckerberg says.
Nick Hanauer:
All of that is fine, we want people to vigorously compete to try to get larger but in the absence of significant countermeasures, policy measures, every market will concentrate into a monopoly over time. Why should we care? And the answer is quite simple because the thing about markets is they actually aren’t efficient at all. That’s a 19th century view of what they do. Markets are a great social technology because if well-structured, they are the most effective social technology we’ve ever found to evolve new solutions to human problems in effective ways. The thing about that evolutionary construct is that it only works if it’s actually competitive. If there actually a bunch of discreet participants trying to solve these problems in new and better ways. And the fewer participants there are, the less problem solving goes on and the more exploitation takes place. And that’s why we want markets to be truly competitive.
And by truly competitive, that means we want lots and lots of robust competitors in every market. And the story of the neoliberal economy over the last 50 years is that we forgot that about markets, and as a consequence, all of our industries concentrated into these basically monopolies or oligopolies. Three bad things happen when you do that. The first is that prices to consumers go up as companies get more and more market power. The second bad thing is that wages for workers goes down, again for basically the same reason because workers have no alternatives to their current employers, and the third bad thing that happens is that we reduce significantly the amount of consumer choice and innovation therefore, that exists in the economy and slow the rate at which we evolve new and better things.
David Goldstein:
And I will add a fourth thing to that, Nick. And that is that we concentrate political power.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
In the hands of a few plutocrats and then they proceed to undermine our democracy to pursue increasing and concentrating their own wealth and power. And that is the natural state of affairs in human society.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
Always and everywhere. And so, the whole purpose of an inclusive democracy is to countervail these powers.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
And keep them from doing that, which is what markets do naturally.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right, exactly.
David Goldstein:
Right. Markets are good, markets are great at innovation, at creating new solutions to human problems, but they’re not perfect because they lead to a winner take all in which there’s a handful of super rich and everybody else is crushed.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. And so, it turns out that you and I are not the first people to make this observation. This has been well understood for a very long time, and it was certainly well known in our country. I mean, geez, for at least a hundred years or maybe longer. That understanding expressed itself in our anti-monopoly laws, there was a bunch of…
David Goldstein:
Antitrust laws.
Nick Hanauer:
Antitrust and anti-monopoly laws that have been on the books in the country for a hundred years or maybe more.
David Goldstein:
Well, more. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 and then the Clayton Antitrust Act, which is where the bulk of the current law still comes from, was passed in 1914.
Nick Hanauer:
Wow, unbelievable.
David Goldstein:
So, this is a deep and ingrained part of our legal and economic culture that for some reason you say you used the term forgotten, it wasn’t forgotten these past 40 years, it’s been ignored, will willfully ignored.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. That’s right. Until Joe Biden came along and reminded us that if we want to have a high functioning society and high functioning markets, we need to get back to this. So, today we get to talk to Maggie Goodlander who’s the Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice, to talk through the administration’s new approach to merger guidelines, which are the very center of this problem and opportunity, and talk us through what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and why it matters.
Maggie Goodlander:
I’m Maggie Goodlander. I’m Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Antitrust Division at the US Department of Justice.
Nick Hanauer:
And you are doing some very, very interesting work with the newly proposed merger guidelines, which is an incredibly big deal. So, tell us what you’re up to and why.
Maggie Goodlander:
The mission of the Antitrust Division is to enforce our federal antitrust laws and those laws are designed to ensure economic opportunity and fairness by promoting free and fair competition. One of the most important of our statutes, although they’re all important, is section seven of the Clayton Act, which is a statute that dates back to 1914. It’s been amended a few times in the intervening period. This is our merger enforcement statute. It’s the statute that the Department of Justice and that the Federal Trade Commission rely upon in enforcing our merger laws. So, these statutes have been on the books for over a century and the Department of Justice has since 1968, together with the FTC, issued what are called merger guidelines, and in the antitrust world, these are self-evident features of antitrust law. In other parts of the law, guidelines are a little bit less common.
So, really the basic purpose of the guidelines is pretty simple. It is to give to the public and frankly to enforcers across the federal government a real sense of how we approach our analysis when it comes to merger enforcement. The way that the department has approached this work has changed over time and the guidelines have been updated. As I mentioned, they were first introduced in 1968. It was actually a then young attorney in the antitrust division named Stephen Breyer who helped to write the guidelines 1968. And they’ve been updated as appropriate in the intervening years. Our impetus for revisiting the guidelines this time around was in part the President’s Executive Order on competition, which was issued in July of 2021.
Nick Hanauer:
Maggie, one of the reasons your job is so consequential today is that the country forgot about antitrust for a very long time, didn’t we?
Maggie Goodlander:
I think that we’ve seen antitrust enforcement as mentioned ebb and flow over time. The laws have always been on the books and I think what’s really exciting about the project that we’ve undertaken, I’d say three things about what’s been exciting. The first is that what we’ve done here is to really revisit the law itself, and there actually isn’t as much law and merger enforcement as you might expect and part of the reason for that is as you point out, the merger laws have not actually been enforced. Really, there was a four decade period where we saw a real dip in the enforcement of the merger laws including Section seven of the Clayton Act.
So, there isn’t a whole lot of case law, but we’ve gone back and really looked at the statutes themselves, looked at the Supreme Court cases and other Circuit Court cases interpreting these laws, and what we’ve really tried to do is produce a document that is faithful to the law as it’s been interpreted by the Supreme Court. Because at the end of the day, really all of our work, all of our legitimacy as law enforcers turns on our faithful interpretation of the laws that Congress writes.
Nick Hanauer:
So these new guidelines are pretty unambiguous, and you’ll take us through them, about trying to limit corporate concentration and increase competition. But, were the guidelines that led to this wave of neoliberal powered consolidation, did they have different guidelines? What were the old guidelines?
Maggie Goodlander:
In the beginning of 2021 when I arrived at the Department of Justice… When you look across the US economy, 75% of US industries have become more consolidated. At the same time, the antitrust division at the Justice Department had more than 200 fewer employees than we had in 1979. I’m very happy to say that we have fewer, fewer employees today [inaudible 00:11:48] years ago. But it’s a really important statistic to keep in mind because I think it really shows you where the emphasis was and where the priorities were with respect to the enforcement of the antitrust laws and beginning with the president and including the Attorney General and our leadership here in the antitrust division were led by Jonathan Cantor, who’s really been an extraordinary advocate for the cause.
But we’ve seen antitrust enforcement really become a pillar of this administration’s economic policy. And it’s been part of the way we’ve dealt with, this lack of resources and our efforts to build up is the problems we’re encountering. The enormity of our task is really sometimes shocking, sometimes unsettling, but what we have now is a real commitment across the whole government to enforce the antitrust laws. And one of the things that surprised me the most was coming to this work, seeing just the sheer number of federal departments and agencies that actually have authority in this area. It’s been an exciting process of dusting off portions of the US code that have really never been used before. I think this is quite new. The evidence is in part that we are seeing statutes, antitrust enforcement statutes that have never been used before now really coming into the fold. And I can give you a couple examples if it’s helpful.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, for sure.
Maggie Goodlander:
We’ve undertaken in both, on the civil side and on the criminal side, I think we have more active investigations in cases than really at any point in our history as a division. One of the exciting developments has been largely through the executive order that the president issued in July of 2021, which includes in it 72 discreet, and I think really helpful action items. It’s opened up for us, real avenues to work with other departments and agencies that have antitrust enforcement authorities that haven’t been used before. So, in our merger work, two of the big cases, there have been nine civil merger suits that have been filed since the beginning of 2021.
Two of them concerned the airline industry and the Department of Transportation, as it turns out, has some pretty extraordinary authorities with respect to antitrust enforcement, and we found that both as a fellow law enforcer and also as the department plays more of a regulatory role, the Department of Transportation than we do at the Justice Department, it’s been really exciting to find ways in which their authorities compliment ours and have really been central to some of our enforcement actions.
David Goldstein:
Could you clarify something for me, and we’ll get into the details of it a little later, that you have these 13 guidelines, which largely focus on market concentration and competition. But for the past 40 years, antitrust has basically focused on one guideline that I could tell them that is does it increase or decrease cost to consumers, which is missing from year 13? Was that a written guideline or was that just an informal policy that the US government has followed for four decades?
Maggie Goodlander:
So, here’s what I’d say. The way that we’ve approached writing up these guidelines has been really to begin with first principles and to begin with the statute that we enforce and the cases that the Supreme Court and other Circuit Courts have issued, interpreting that statute in particular cases. To your point about price increase, this is one way to measure the potential. At the end of the day, what we’re really doing is we’re looking at specific cases, specific facts, and we’re applying a lot of those to those facts that are before us. But the question that we’re beginning our analysis with is really how competition presents itself in a particular market and how a merger might actually risk lessening competition substantially now or in the future. And so, increases in price are one metric that we certainly have pointed to in our cases, and there’s nothing in the current guidelines that abandon that basic approach.
But we’ve really tried to look carefully at how the law has been applied over time, and increases in price for consumers are certainly one harm that we see, but equally important and one important contribution I think that these guidelines, these draft guidelines are making is really to, for the first time explicitly mention and address the impact of anticompetitive mergers on labor markets. The antitrust laws have always applied equally to labor markets as they have to any other types of markets. The statute when you look at the text is very, very broad. And so what we’re really trying to do is to be faithful to the law and to interpret it in the way that it is broadly written.
David Goldstein:
And how is this effort being received by the current generation of jurists largely who have been educated within the law and economics movement?
Maggie Goodlander:
You mean the guidelines themselves, or do you mean in our…
David Goldstein:
I assume you’re already arguing these in court.
Maggie Goodlander:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Right so, I’m just wondering how the judges, I mean overwhelmingly have been influenced by the law and economics movement, which has largely focused on basically consumer prices as the be all and end all of antitrust, which is not what the law says obviously, but that’s how it’s been enforced for 40 years.
Nick Hanauer:
And it’s also, just to be clear, it’s an incredibly stupid standard. First because there’s no way to judge it, and there’s no way to take it back after you approve the merger and they jack the prices up. Corporate concentration always leads to higher prices. It can’t not.
David Goldstein:
So, obviously the administration and the Justice Department and FTC are doing something different here than what has been done in the past. I’m just wondering, the courts in the end have final say and whether you’ve made any progress in moving the courts on this.
Maggie Goodlander:
So, one exciting example from one of our recent merger enforcement cases. Last year, the division, we successfully blocked Penguin Random House from acquiring its close competitor, Simon & Schuster. So, this was a lawsuit that prevented the largest book publisher in the world from exerting outsized influence over not the price of books, but actually at the core of our case, the theory of our case was, the harm that would be inflicted on authors as a result of the merger. So, the issue there was over how much authors are paid for their work, nothing to do with prices for consumers. Ultimately that’s what the case turned on. We brought the case to trial Judge Pan, who’s now a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals was then a judge on the DC District Court who presided over the trial, issued what I think is a really powerful and important decision. I think that case shows that these theories are rooted in law and they’re being recognized as such by courts.
Nick Hanauer:
So Maggie, there are 13 separate guidelines that are supposed to guide how we think about mergers in the future. Can you step us through several of those or give us the high points of these guidelines?
David Goldstein:
The main themes.
Maggie Goodlander:
Well, so I think just stepping back, the guidelines themselves are not law. They really are a synthesis and a presentation of how, as law enforcers, we approach the task of assessing whether a particular merger is unlawful under Section 7 of the Clayton Act. And so, the unifying question that begins the analysis is really a basic question, which is how does competition present itself in a particular case, in a particular market? And the guidelines, if you read through them, many of the concepts are pretty intuitive ones that build on and aim to really expand and in some cases clarify frameworks that have been set out in previous versions of the guidelines.
So, our aim really is, as I was saying, is one, fidelity to the law and two, to really update these guidelines so that they reflect market realities and that is itself, by the way, part of what we know is true about merger law and antitrust law, that it’s our responsibility to look at the particular facts at the economics in a particular case and apply the law. So, what the guidelines really do is to try to distill usable principles of law from cases decided by the Supreme Court and by important circuit court decisions as well.
So, the guidelines range from starting basic principles like, mergers should not significantly increase competition concentration in highly concentrated markets. So, I think there’s intuitive appeal to many of the guidelines, and including guideline number one. The approach that we’re taking has really built on, as I was saying, a recognition that the antitrust laws apply with equal force in labor markets just as they do in product markets. And so, guideline number 11 really addresses itself specifically to that important principle which we think is deeply rooted in antitrust law.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay, great. So, in what ways does the new approach depart substantially from the older neoliberal approach? Is it simply being more vigorous in how we apply the statutes, or is it newer interpretations of the old statutes? I guess my sense is that we’ve had these statutes on the books for whatever it has been a hundred years, and basically during the neoliberal era, since the 1980s, we just sort of forgot about them, we just…
David Goldstein:
Well, willfully them.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
We knew they were there.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
David Goldstein:
Are you asking, Nick, is this more about clarifying our approaching guidelines or actually making the decision to enforce the law, which we haven’t really been doing for 40 years?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Is that a fair question, Maggie?
Maggie Goodlander:
Yeah. Look, I think part of what these guidelines are doing, so just begin with the simple fact that this set of guidelines is really the first set of guidelines that has included citations to Supreme Court cases. Just that simple point, I think that tells you a lot about how, because these guidelines have been manuals available to the public of course, and that’s part of what’s been so exciting about this process. We’ve received thousands and thousands of comments from workers, from farmers, from nurses on the front lines, from small business owners, from writers and other content creators.
And I think the guidelines are written for general audience, but really they’re to be, this is meant to be a document for enforcers. And so we’re, at the end of the day, law enforcement depends on two critical inputs, the first being the law itself, and we’ve got statutes and cases that interpret that law in the first instance, and then we have the facts of a particular case. Economics is incredibly important in the field of antitrust, but there is a difference between law and economics, and that itself I think is a distinction that much to my surprise is not always recognized. And there is still a place for law in all of this and I think that’s one of the really important contributions of this effort.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, and particularly when the economics you’re referring to got it all wrong, right? Because at the core of the problem was this idea that corporate consolidation was a good thing, not a bad thing. And that the bigger the big got…
David Goldstein:
That it increased efficiency.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. That there would be a good economic outcome from all of this consolidation, it’s quite obvious now in retrospect, that was just wrong. That, that theory of economics was just factually incorrect. If we had not ignored the law all those years, we would actually be more prosperous, not less. I think that’s at the core of what’s going on here is a recognition that we got the economics wrong and we shouldn’t have ignored the law.
Maggie Goodlander:
Yeah, I think that is one way of seeing it and I think we’re trying to do both things to correct for both basic errors in this, or departures might be another way of putting it from the law itself and from the very best of economic theory and it’s been so exciting to see our economists that work on this, we really have built a team here in the antitrust division. It’s a real privilege to work alongside these men and women who are at the top of their fields and who are coming at this from really different perspectives and with different backgrounds. We have labor economists, we of course have Iowa economists, but we also have technologists. This has been a really important piece of what Jonathan Cantor has done in leading the division. We are building out experts across all relevant realms of expertise that we really need to rely upon, and that includes technologists and economists who see these issues through all of the relevant and appropriate lenses.
David Goldstein:
These guidelines are meant to address proposed mergers, how to evaluate proposed mergers, and whether to proceed or to try to block them. Are they also being applied retroactively to past mergers? For example, Facebook’s acquisition of any number of former competitors and other companies like that. Will we see from the antitrust division efforts to break up some of the highly consolidated monopolist companies that we have right now?
Maggie Goodlander:
One of the guidelines that I think is worth highlighting here is guideline seven. And again, thank you for letting me number these guidelines because it makes me feel excited that you and your listeners will read the document, and I really do suggest doing that because it was really meant for you as much as it is for all of us.
David Goldstein:
And we will provide a link in the show notes. So, if people want to click through, you can read all 13 guidelines for yourself.
Maggie Goodlander:
Guideline seven says merger should not entrench or extend a dominant position. So, really a chief concern here is ensuring that mergers don’t preserve monopoly power. And that’s really how we framed and I think guideline seven in this respect is a really important piece to how we see the broader landscape of merger enforcement. But we of course also have other tools under the antitrust laws, including the Sherman Act. And another exciting piece of the work that’s been underway here at the division has been our monopolization cases, and we have two major cases, one of which is scheduled to… The trial is scheduled to begin here in DC in mid-September. These tools are complimentary but distinct. So I just point that out.
David Goldstein:
But the same general principles apply to how you would approach a proposed merger as how you might approach evaluating whether an existing company might be subject to antitrust enforcement in an effort to have them divest of some of their businesses. Or am I reading that wrong?
Maggie Goodlander:
Well, I think it’s a little hard for me to answer the question. I think what I’d say is, a key piece to the merger guidelines, and really I think a key framing to the document again, is that we look really in each case to how competition presents itself in a particular market under a particular facts of a given case. And so, we’re going to be attuned to all of the relevant market realities. And that’s, I think, a big piece of how, just really a key first principle to how we approach the work.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s so interesting. Okay so, couple of final questions. First, the benevolent dictator question. So, if you were in charge and politics was not a concern, what would you do to fix all these problems?
Maggie Goodlander:
How many problems are we talking about? Well, the full…
David Goldstein:
[inaudible 00:29:39] You pick them.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Corporate concentration in America.
Maggie Goodlander:
What I’d say is, merger enforcement is one piece of our work, it’s not the whole picture, but it has, I think in some ways you could say it’s a subtle but foundational impact on the structure of our economy. So, where we set the bar, part of the reason why these guidelines are so important is that our merger enforcement decisions determine over time how industries get structured and consolidated ultimately through mergers. So, this has, I think, a really big impact on our economy and the middle class ultimately. The benevolent dictator question is a really interesting one. Because I think in part it’s a hard question to answer because law enforcement itself is, we really have to take the facts as they come to us and I think part of the beauty of our democracy is that we are limited by the laws that Congress writes and by what is true and what the facts are in a given case. So, in some sense, I don’t know that I could think as a responsible person in law enforcement through the lens of a benevolent dictator in a sense that you are totally incompatible.
Nick Hanauer:
Interesting.
David Goldstein:
So Nick, what she’s telling us is that contrary to what Trump might believe, dictatorship is actually illegal.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh, dammit.
David Goldstein:
In this country, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Still.
David Goldstein:
Am I getting that right? Maggie, as an attorney, maybe dictatorship isn’t such a great idea.
Maggie Goodlander:
Well, in a sense, dictatorship and monopoly power are really both fruit from the same rotten tree. Which is part of the reason why this work is so exciting, because it is ultimately motivated by ideas that animate our democracy itself. And the value of competition is a rule of law value. And I think it’s a value that keeps our country safer. It’s a value also that protects our civil rights. And I’m reminded often in this work that on bad days, I read one of my favorite decisions from Thurgood Marshall, who he wrote when he was on the Supreme Court, an antitrust case in which he said that the antitrust laws are as important to the preservation of economic freedom and our free enterprise system as the Bill of Rights is the protection of our fundamental personal freedoms. And I think that’s really true.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I never thought of it that way, but you’re almost certainly correct. He was almost certainly correct. That’s great. Very cool. And one final question, why do you do this work?
Maggie Goodlander:
Well, I think really that is the reason that to me, I come to this work from… I’ve spent most of the last 15 years in government, and I’ve been really lucky to have a chance to work in all three branches of our federal government. So, I came to Article II and to the Justice Department last of the three branches and what I love about this work, in this moment is that for us as a democracy, I have a lot of faith in the people themselves and in the value, the civic value, and in the power of citizens themselves. And I think part of this effort with the guidelines is that it’s given us a portal to really hearing the stories of ordinary people across the country who see the wrongs, see the injustice, and also believe in law, but specifically in our antitrust laws as a path to a more perfect union.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much for being with us.
Maggie Goodlander:
Thank you.
David Goldstein:
I thought it was really interesting, Nick, when she declined to answer the benevolent dictator question because…
Nick Hanauer:
It’s too funny.
David Goldstein:
As maybe a deputy attorney general in the US Justice Department, she might know that dictatorships are bad and not really something the lawyer should be even thinking about.
Nick Hanauer:
Illegal.
David Goldstein:
But what was interesting about that in explaining her reservations, how she made this comparison between monopolies and dictatorships. Between market concentration dictatorship. And that reminds me of one of my favorite episodes. We did our conversation with the philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, about her book Private Government, in which she refers to firms as the “Communist dictatorships in our midst.”
Nick Hanauer:
Right, absolutely.
David Goldstein:
And that sounds a little snarky, but when you actually go through her arguments, yes. What she’s describing, the way a firm operates, it’s a dictatorship. And Elon Musk is a dictator within his own companies, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
David Goldstein:
Clearly, what’s happening at Twitter, that’s not the result of some sort of inclusive democracy that is an insane dictator just imposing his will on what used to be a useful public square. So, it gets back to this idea, and we mentioned this in the intro, how undemocratic market concentration is and how it inevitably leads to un-freedom.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, absolutely. But to be clear, one of the good things about business is that every business is a tiny dictatorship. As a consequence, it can make decisions quickly and either live or die on the basis of those decisions.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, so says one of those dictators.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s great to be dictator.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, it’s good to be the king.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s good to be the king.
David Goldstein:
We know that lot. But there’s economic consequences as well I think. Obviously that’s what we focused on this podcast and the idea that we finally, the Republicans get credit from voters, voters overwhelmingly think that they’re the party that they trust on business. It’s crazy when you look at the empirical evidence. It’s understandable when you look at the way Democrats have historically failed on narrative, but we have a democratic president who’s actually focusing on competition and not just giving it lip service and that is really, really important, not just to having a vibrant market economy, but to having a large, robust and inclusive middle class.
Nick Hanauer:
And a democracy that functions. And this promoting competition thing could not be more middle out. An economy that is structured in a way to maximize the number of robust participants is effectively the central idea of middle out economics, and both it extends in all domains and most particularly into markets and how we structure them. So, it’s super cool and exciting to talk to Maggie. And again, this is among the more wonkier things that’s going on in political economy in the country today. It’s hard for people to see and understand, but I just think we should talk about it all the time because it matters so much.
Speaker 4:
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See you next week.