Bust Up America's Monopolies Before They Do More Harm

Theodore Roosevelt is an American icon. His face appears on Mount Rushmore, and his confident, confrontational approach is still remembered fondly. But Roosevelt wasn't quite a Republican of the laissez-faire Reaganite mold. Much of his campaign rhetoric now reads like language from a Bernie Sanders campaign rally. Roosevelt’s main attack against the “malefactors of great wealth,” as he called them, was to try to break up the monopolies and cartels that he saw as siphoning wealth from working-class Americans.

Now, modern-day Democrats are taking a page out of Roosevelt’s book. As part of a plan called the “Better Deal,” New York Senator Chuck Schumer and other party leaders have pledged to combat market concentration. The plan would create a new federal agency specifically devoted to prosecuting companies for anticompetitive practices. It would make government review of mergers mandatory instead of optional, and require regular postmerger follow-up assessments. It would judge mergers based not just on how they affect consumer prices, but on whether they hurt suppliers. And, most importantly, it would put the burden of proof on companies that want to merge, forcing them to show that their combination wouldn’t hurt competition, rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt.