Despite containing useful information, a Financial Times story makes some puzzling statements (“Trump Nominee Unites Right and Left with Tough Antitrust View,” Financial Times, March 7, 2025):
Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.
While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement–much to Wall Street’s chagrin. …
Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives.
Who are “the US president’s other nominees [who] tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates?” The “free market advocates” are difficult to find in Trump’s entourage, or they are dumb silent. No free-market advocate can reject free trade among individuals in the way that Trump and his entourage do. As I argued before, the “unlikely alignment of progressives … and a new generation of populist conservatives” is easy to understand. It has only become tighter and more visible. Historically, populist rulers, of the right and of the left, have defended the primacy of collective and political choices against individual and private choices, as the experience of Latin America shows.
Antitrust laws, which grant extraordinary power to the state, are just one illustration. We would expect that such power would naturally be used by the state rulers of the day to take sides in favor of their preferred clientèles and against individuals and groups that do not fit well in their ideal economic organization. It was only a matter of time before this power could, in advanced “democratic” countries, be openly used against “enemies of the state.” It may now be happening in the United States. The Financial Times reports that
a top deal banker said corporate leaders fear that under Trump, antitrust may be used to punish enemies and reward friends in ways that are unpredictable.
That the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the price of eggs seems to confirm this fear: a scapegoat must be found to explain why the president has not succeeded in lowering food prices “starting on day one” as he had promised (“Justice Department Opens Probe of Sharp Surge in Egg Prices,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2025).
It would not be the first time political power has intervened in the administration of justice, but the fact that the DoJ is now quasi-officially at the service of the president’s “vision” makes witch-hunts more probable and more dangerous (“Trump Tightens Grip on FBI and Justice Department,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2025). Ten years ago, most Americans probably thought that the danger of state lawlessness had receded since J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon. The Wall Street Journal writes:
While every FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover has taken pains to keep the White House at arms length, the new Trump administration has taken the opposite tack, working to bring the traditionally independent ethos of the FBI and Justice Department firmly within the president’s grasp. …
Louis Freeh, who was director under former President Bill Clinton, irked the president by surrendering his White House access badge during his first week on the job, after learning that Clinton was under investigation for a controversial land deal, which became known as the Whitewater scandal.
James Comey refused to play basketball with former President Barack Obama because he didn’t want to appear too chummy with the man who appointed him.
One of the few areas of public policy where individual liberty seemed to have strengthened over the past several decades was indeed in the quasi-disappearance of the incestuous relationship between politicians and the administration of justice. Of course, the state continued to grow but most individuals seemed better protected against glaring arbitrary power.
Whatever good intuitions and commendable intentions Mr. Trump has—and he has expressed some—they look like random blips likely to fail among his enervated interventionism, his imperial entertainment, and the infatuation with collective choices that he shares with the other major political party. He just wants to impose different tastes and values on the 50.2% of voters who did not vote for him and, tragically, on many in his 49.8%. A grave danger is that this be mistaken for the defense of individual liberty.
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Jean-Baptiste Colbert writing a report for the King, as imagined by DALL-E (with some external influence)
