By Richard J. Pierce, The Hill
The inflation rate is now 8.6 percent — the highest rate in 40 years. President Biden says that reducing the level of inflation is his top domestic priority. Yet, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission and the head of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice are obsessed with the need to throw consumers under the bus and force sellers to increase the prices they charge for goods and services.
Both FTC Chair Lina Khan and the head of the Antitrust Division, Jonathan Kanter, have made it a high priority to eliminate the consumer welfare standard that the Supreme Court and most antitrust scholars have embraced for 50 years. They want to replace that standard with a list of rules of fair play among firms. One of the rules at the top of their list is a prohibition on charging low prices to consumers. They refer to the practice of charging low prices as predatory pricing.
Khan and Kanter spend a lot of time criticizing what they call predatory pricing and threatening to take aggressive enforcement actions against firms that engage in that practice. It is easy to predict the results of their campaign to punish firms that charge low prices. When we engaged in a campaign to punish predatory pricing in the past, the results were not pretty.
