|
“On Friday, as President Joe
Biden signed ‘An Executive Order Promoting Competition in the American
Economy,’ he echoed the language of his predecessors. ‘[C]ompetition keeps
the economy moving and keeps it growing,’ he said. ‘Fair competition is why
capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth….
But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more
concentration that holds our economy back.’ “Biden listed how prescription drugs,
hearing aids, internet service, and agricultural supplies are all overpriced
in the U.S. because of a lack of competition (RFD TV, the nation’s rural
channel, has a long-running ad complaining of the cost of hearing aids). He
also noted that noncompete clauses make it hard for workers to change jobs,
another issue straight out of the late nineteenth century, when southern
states tried to keep prices low by prohibiting employers from hiring Black
workers away from their current jobs. “‘I’m a proud capitalist,’ Biden said. ‘I
know America can’t succeed unless American business succeeds…. But let me be
very clear: Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism; it’s
exploitation. Without healthy competition, big players can change and charge
whatever they want and treat you however they want…. ‘[W]e know we’ve got a
problem—a major problem. But we also have an incredible opportunity. We
can bring back more competition to more of the country, helping entrepreneurs
and small businesses get in the game, helping workers get a better deal,
helping families save money every month. The good news is: We’ve done it
before.’ “Biden reached into our history to reclaim
our long tradition of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both
Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the
Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New
Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business,
first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing
competition. “Civil War era Republicans had organized
around the idea that the American economy enjoyed what they called a ‘harmony
of interest.’ By that, they meant that everyone had the same economic
interests. People at the bottom of the economy, people who drew value out of
the products of nature—trees, or fish, or grain—produced value through their
hard work. They created more value than they could consume, and this value,
in the form of capital, employed people on the next level of the economy:
shoemakers, dry goods merchants, cabinetmakers, and so on. They, in turn,
produced more than they could consume, and their excess supported a few
industrialists and financiers at the top of the pyramid who, in their turn,
employed those just starting out. In this vision, the economy was a web in
which every person shared a harmony of interest. “But by the 1880s, this idea that all
Americans shared the same economic interest had changed into the idea that
protecting American businesses would be good for everyone. American
businessmen had begun to consolidate their enterprises into trusts, bringing
a number of corporations under the same umbrella. The trusts stifled
competition and colluded to raise the prices paid by consumers. Their power
and funding gave them increasing power over lawmakers. As wealth migrated
upward and working Americans felt like they had less and less control over
their lives, they began to wonder what had happened to the equality for which
they had fought the Civil War. “Labor leaders, newspapers, and Democratic
lawmakers began to complain about the power of the wealthy in society and to
claim the economic game was rigged, but their general critiques of the
economy simply left them open to charges of being ‘socialists’ who wanted to
overturn society. Congress in 1890 finally gave in and passed an antitrust
act, but it was so toothless that only one senator in the staunchly
pro-business Senate voted against it, and no one in the House of
Representatives voted no. “Then, around 1900, the so-called muckrakers
hit their stride. Muckrakers were journalists who took on the political
corruption and the concentration of wealth that plagued their era, but rather
than making general moral statements, they did deep research into the
workings of specific industries and political machines—Standard Oil, for
example, and Minneapolis city government—and revealed the details behind the
general outrage. “Their stories built pressure to regulate
the robber barons, as they were called by then, but Congress, dominated by
business interests, had no interest. Instead, President Theodore Roosevelt
and his successor, William Howard Taft, tended to rein in the trusts through
the executive branch of the government, especially by legal action undertaken
by the Department of Justice. “On Friday, Biden promised to
use the power of the executive branch to rein in corporations, much as
Theodore Roosevelt did during his terms of office. But there was more to
Biden’s statement than that. His emphasis on restoring competition is from
the next historical phase of antitrust action. “In the 1912 election, political language
turned away from the evils of trusts and toward the economic competition so
central to American life. Both Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat
Woodrow Wilson centered their campaigns around the idea that big business was
strangling competition. Wilson called for a ‘New Freedom’ that would get rid
of the trusts once and for all and return the nation to a world of small
enterprise and opportunity. Roosevelt scoffed at this idea. He talked of the ‘New
Nationalism,’ in which a large government would restore competition by
regulating big businesses. (He said that if you got rid of trusts and then
looked away, they would immediately spring up again.) “While their solutions were different, both
Roosevelt and Wilson had reframed the stratified economy not solely as a
problem, but also as an opportunity. Trimming the sails of the corporations
was not an attack on the liberty of industrialists, but rather a restoration
of the competition that had, in the past, enabled the country’s economy to
thrive. And, once elected, Wilson managed to get key items of that agenda
passed through Congress. “That positive emphasis on competition
carried into the administration of the next Roosevelt president, FDR. Biden
noted that FDR called for Congress to pass an economic bill of rights,
including ‘the right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an
atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies.’
And indeed, the idea of restoring a level playing field for all businesses,
rather than letting them succeed or fail based on the whims of economic
wirepullers, persuaded businessmen who had previously opposed regulation to
line up behind the establishment of our Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. “Americans have lost this tradition since
1980, Biden said, when we abandoned the ‘fundamental American idea that true
capitalism depends on fair and open competition.’ Reframing business
regulation as ‘laws to promote competition,’ he promised 72 specific actions
to enforce antitrust laws, stop ‘abusive actions by monopolies,’ and end ‘bad
mergers that lead to mass layoffs, higher prices, fewer options for workers
and consumers alike.’ “For 40 years, the Republican Party has
offered a vision of America as a land of hyper-individualism, in which any
government intervention in the economy is seen as an attack on individual
liberty because it hampers the accumulation of wealth. Biden’s speech
on Friday reclaims a different theme in our
history, that of government protecting individualism by keeping the economic
playing field level” -Heather Cox Richardson. —- Notes: |
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.