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“Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.”
― Josh Hawley
In 1973 a man walked into a bank in Stockholm, Sweden with a Russian automatic rifle and held it up. During this event he took three female hostages and one male hostage that he ended up holding for what would be a 131 hour marathon of chaos.
During this event the hostages were exposed to a series of very traumatic experiences as he terrorized them throughout this ordeal. As it turns out he actually put a noose around their necks during certain points of the hold up and constantly threatened to kill them. In addition to this he actually pointed the rifle at them and fired it multiple times in their direction.
However, at the end of the day when this event finally came to its conclusion he had not physically harmed any of the hostages. When the man finally decided to surrender something very unusual happened that would shock the authorities.
When this event came to its conclusion the authorities expected the hostages to be antagonistic towards the hostage taker, but at the end of this experience the hostages had expressed more fear and concern towards the police officers than they did toward the guy that had been holding them against their will.
What was even stranger is that they didn’t even claim to hate, or dislike the hostage taker after the event. The hostages even went so far as to not even bother to testify against the man. In fact, one of the women ended up marrying the hostage taker after he was released from prison in 1980.
That hostage taker and bank robber Jan-Erik Olsson moved to Thailand and in 2009 released his autobiography, entitled Stockholm Syndrome.
So what’s the moral of this wild, but true story here?
Just because you’re single and broke could this story suggest that you should arm yourself, commandeer a bank, and take a bunch of people hostage in hopes of meeting your future wife, or husband?
I know you may laugh, however this would mirror a similar line of thinking regarding the current day’s RINOs and establishment Libertarians who think that the nationwide riots going on right now are NOT the result of an invasion, or Fifth Column activity. These people want to argue that the riots are the result of a group of non-citizens that love America despite them burning old glory in the streets while brandishing the flags of their country of origin.
These same RINO and establishment Libertarians also believe that the Neo-Brandeisian movement to break the back of big business in this current day is somehow anti-free market. As it relates to this current day on the issues of illegal immigration, and the economic reality of the country, this sort of thinking is what is known as effete intellectualism.
The Neo-Brandeisian Movement
Louis Brandeis was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. He would enter Harvard University (long before the institution became a hotbed of CCP Fifth Column activity) when he was 18 years of age and would end up graduating in 1877 with the highest average in the law school’s history.
Brandeis would end up becoming a Justice in the Supreme Court from 1916-1939. During his tenure he would also end up becoming an extraordinary Justice in the Supreme Court as he employed the skills that had also made him a renowned attorney.
Throughout his career he had a certain perspective regarding his view of the law and its application. For him the law was a device that would be used to shape social, economic, and political affairs. I would say that for right, or wrong Brandeis is 100% correct in this assessment.
As an overview he believed that the law had to function on the basis of two key assumptions. These two things involved the belief that the individual was the basic force in society and that the individual also had limited capabilities.
Now within this model of belief Brandeis did not seek to coddle the individual, but rather his aim embraced the notion that the individual’s potential should be stretched to its limit.
Given this view of the intended function of the law, Brandeis came into the picture during his time to put forth the warning of heavily concentrated corporate power and wealth. Brandeis believed that if a company was too large and too profitable that it was an inherent threat to the market.
Now at the turn of the 20th century there was a wave of populism to hit the scene along with politicians that came along to ride that wave. Sounds familiar, right?
Well at that time the term antitrust was prevalent throughout the American lexicon during the turn of the 20th century which lit the fuse for that very wave of populism that soon followed.
During this time the politicians set their crosshairs on trusts. In case you didn’t know these trusts essentially were large umbrella companies that held the assets of many other businesses. The idea was that these businesses were monopolies.
This is essentially where the idea of trust busting came from. In fact, it was in 1890 when congress would pass the Sherman Antitrust Act which is a federal statute that prohibits activities that restrict interstate commerce and competition in the marketplace. Now please hang with me here because this is going to get very interesting.
Now as we fast forward to the current day we’re seeing some common threads here in the beginning of this 21st century that mirror what was going on at the beginning of the 20th century.
After all, once the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890 it was President Teddy Roosevelt that came along in 1911 with a hell-bent attitude on busting up several trusts that existed at that time. Roosevelt would end up busting up a huge railroad conglomerate, the Northern Securities Company, along with many other companies.
Now as I previously stated Brandeis believed that if a company was too large and too profitable that it was an inherent threat to the market. However, if bureaucrats couldn’t prove that companies had an actual monopoly over the markets they would rely on what Brandeis called “The Curse of Bigness.”
Now the reality is that it proved to be difficult to determine what was too large or too profitable so by the time the 1980s rolled around most regulators decided to adopt what is known as the Consumer Welfare Standard (CWS).
The CWS basically helped to gauge the scale of determining whether a company’s size, or success was a danger by looking at whether or not the company posed any harm to the consumer.
Granted, today much of this focus has brought Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google into the crosshairs of the Neo-Brandeisian movement. These concerns regarding the welfare of consumers consist of multiple reasons. This is mainly because these companies acquire and possess a tremendous amount of information on consumers. Additionally these companies also possess an enormous amount of wealth that enables them to buy up startups faster than most people are able to keep count.
However, despite these issues concerning the consumer there are many other issues that the critics of the Neo-Brandeisian movement seem to lack a fundamental understanding about regarding what the movement is actually advocating for in today’s marketplace.
In the new Brandeis school of Antitrust Lina M. Khan is the author of Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox . In her paper she expands on the purpose of antitrust where the focus isn’t only meant to function in the narrow space of the consumer through introducing any sort of welfare into the market, but rather it should promote truly competitive markets throughout our business sector.
You see, I'm personally a huge advocate for free market competition. As a small business owner (like most all small business owners) I understand the significance of this better than most.
However, as a small business owner the one thing I really don’t like is the abundance of government subsidies. You see if you take any business in the world and decide to allow that business to be propped up by the tax dollars of the consumers then what incentive does that business have to compete in the market in order to produce a better and more affordable product, or service?
The correct answer to that question is ABSOLUTELY NONE. Additionally, the moment a business takes a subsidy the entire notion of being in a free market is thrown right out the window.
To expand on the same company that Lina M. Khan used in the title of her paper, Amazon is a prime example of this…by the way, I did say prime example…pun intended.
You see, the business model of Amazon is an example of Technofeudalism. This is a term and system that Yanis Varoufakis points out in the title of his book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
In his book Yanis explains how under feudalism, a landowner would grant fiefs to vassals, who would then farm the land and then give a portion of the yield back to the chief landowner. In a sobering modern day comparison Yanis points out how Jeff Besos’s relationship with the vendors on Amazon isn’t really all that different. (Source: The New Yorker)
For more clarity on Technofeudalism I want to encourage you to scroll down and click the link to that episode here as it really breaks down the threat that this model poses to our economic system at large.
However, as bad as the Technofeudalism is in regards to how Amazon is able to abuse its sellers the thing that makes it even worse is what I mentioned earlier involving the subsidies. The real problem here is that this massive company, along with all of the other Big Tech companies, receive enormous rewards in the form of tax subsidies in addition to them already being big and powerful.
According to the Amazon tracker on the Good Jobs First website Amazon has received in excess of $11.6 billion in subsidies with the latest update being as recent as January 1, 2025. I’m sure when you look at every small business in the country they didn’t get the luxury of receiving several billions of dollars in subsidies in order to prop them up.
As if the Big Tech companies aren’t big enough it seems they get a lot of help getting even bigger as they continue to grow their capacity for wealth, data mining, and their ability to suppress competition from ever sprouting up in order to get into the ring with them to compete.
In fact, I want to take a second to expand on that fighting metaphor I just mentioned in terms of being able to get into the ring. When it comes to two fighters getting inside the squared circle to compete you understand how this works, right?
Just in case there are any readers or listeners that aren’t sure, I want to take a moment to clarify this because it’s very important. When two competing fighters get into the ring they are both supposed to have an equal and fair shot at winning the fight.
This fairness is supposed to be managed by the referees and the judges that score the fight should the fight have to be decided by a points total at the end. This type of ending in a fight would occur if a fighter is unable to win decisively with a knockout, technical knockout, or submission if the fight happens to be an MMA bout.
However, when we look at the fighters inside the arena of business today, as it relates to these oligarchies, we see them as being one of the fighters inside the ring. The other fighter working to rise up and compete against these oligarchs would represent the other fighter inside the arena of business. Now if the oligarchs are one fighter and a rising competitor is the other fighter, then the government is supposed to represent the referee and judges who are supposed to be making sure the fight is fair.
However, when the referee is giving aid to the oligarchs during the fight in order to get a winning advantage over the competition then there’s no fair fight. In fact, in this scenario instead of the referee calling a fair fight the referee and judges are instead getting directly involved in picking the winners and losers in the fight.
The reality is that inside the arena of business today the referees and judges (aka the government) are picking the winners and losers. The so-called referee is actually responsible for propping up the oligarchies that are resulting in what Brandeis would refer to as The Curse of Bigness.
So what type of aid is the referee giving the oligarchs? That aid typically comes in the form of those government subsidies I was talking about earlier in addition to direct access to the most powerful people in the government.
This access comes with an enhanced ability to turn around and reward those very politicians (aka the referees) in the form of generous campaign donations, political activism, and even the ability to corrupt elections. That last part is surprisingly easy if some of those oligarchs happen to be big tech oligarchs like we’ve witnessed with Mark Zuckerberg in the 2020 election.
This is one of the major issues concerning the actual creation of monopolies and trusts in the first place. Because of this these monopolies may actually be able to create a position where they sell the public on the illusion of producing cheap products, but do so at the cost of destroying true economic growth within the system that they are leeching off of.
To be very blunt these monopolies are able to offer cheap products because they’ve offshored the bulk of their manufacturing to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). If we’re being straightforward here, the reason those products are cheap is because these oligarchs have agreed to allow the bulk of their products to be built off the backs of slave labor, but digress.
As these oligarchs continue to be supported they will continue to grow unabated. Their continued growth will also result in the continued destruction of the U.S. economy as they will destroy job opportunities for people with the assisted growth of their development of AI that they plan to use in order to replace human beings.
Now the crazy thing is that the size and wealth of these oligarchs has resulted in their continued abuse of the American economic and business sector.
This abuse has been going on for quite a long time now without anyone being held accountable for their behavior in regards to their corrupt actions in their quest to grow. This is the very thing that the Neo-Brandeisian movement is pointing out as The Curse of Bigness.
It’s my view that we are now living in a moment where there’s been such a cultural shift in this Great Awakening that the possibility to enforce accountability with these oligarchs is more obtainable now than ever before in history.
The Wrap Up
The reality is that the abuse of these oligarchs over the consumer and business population has been going on for so long now that much of the private sector is either too ignorant, too brainwashed, or have lied to themselves too much to recognize what’s been going on. It only requires the simple act of being able to observe to see that the economic well-being of the middle class has been completely eroded over time.
Despite the fact that these monopolies have literally cratered the economies of many small towns throughout the country due to them offshoring much of their high paying manufacturing jobs, they have also managed to add insult to injury by buying off politicians to help them finance their effort off the backs of taxpayers through their massive tax subsidies.
At the beginning of this episode I talked about the very strange and well documented case of the bank robbery that Jan-Erik Olsson was responsible for in Stockholm, Sweden. In studying that event we learned about a very unusual psychological condition where people who are kidnapped, or held hostage, often end up developing feelings of affection, or trust towards their captors.
Of course, this unusual phenomenon is what is known as Stockholm Syndrome.
When looking at the state of the U.S. economy it’s clear that the long-standing abuse from these oligarchs has been effective. The evidence that they have stolen and perverted the business, financial, and economic system of the country to favor their pursuits is completely obvious. As this is the case the economic state of the country continues to erode as these people continue to grow in wealth and power.
What is less obvious to those who fail to recognize this is that they have convinced themselves, just as Olsson's hostages did in that bank, that this is absolutely normal.
In other words, the RINOs and establishment Libertarians who are screaming the loudest in their criticisms of the Neo-Brandeisian movement are acting like giving billions of dollars in tax subsidies to oligarchs is somehow a support of free-markets.
Earlier I used the metaphor of how two competing fighters in the arena of business are both supposed to have a fair shot to win the fight. Additionally, I pointed out how the referee (aka the government) has been frequently favoring one fighter over the other by giving him a winning advantage.
Now just like any competitive fight the supporting fanbase always wants a fair fight as well. However, in this metaphorical comparison the current fanbase (mostly consisting of the RINOs and establishment Libertarians) have been suffering from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome for quite some time now.
The good news regarding the rest of the fanbase who can see that the fight is rigged is that they now have an opportunity to also intervene in favor of the fighter that’s been getting cheated by the referees and the judges.
The Neo-Brandeisian movement is the mechanism that can give the true fanbase (aka the American people) an opportunity to toss in a pair of metaphorical brass knuckles to the fighter that has been cheated in order to help even the odds inside the squared circle.
Do you think we have a good opportunity to break up the Big Tech oligarchs in this current political environment?
Have you noticed that the RINOs and many of the establishment anti-MAGA Libertarians have been suffering from TDS and a serious case of Stockholm Syndrome?
Please share your feedback in the comment section below.
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