Exclusive: 25+ organizations warn of Biden’s politicized antitrust policies
A coalition of free-market advocates warned Congress that President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are operating “beyond their remit to provide political cover for Biden’s reelection,” in a letter first reported by the Washington Reporter.
The coalition, which includes Club for Growth, Americans for Tax Reform, and Digital Liberty, accused Biden of breaking decades of precedent to score political points, using methods such as suing Live Nation-Ticketmaster over a ticket-buying frenzy-induced website crash to turn Taylor Swift fans blue this November.
“For nearly 50 years, the government had to prove that consumers were actually harmed to bring an antitrust case,” Digital Liberty’s Executive Director James Erwin told the Reporter. “Biden’s agencies have cast the consumer welfare standard to the wind so they can throw successful American companies to the dogs.”
The signatories said that the DOJ’s Antitrust Division is trying “to turn Taylor Swift fans into Biden voters”; they also targeted the FTC for its “obsession,” in the words of Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and its demands that “Twitter hand over all internal communications mentioning Musk as well as a list of journalists in communication with Twitter employees.”
Free-market advocates said in their letter that the Live-Nation Ticketmaster crash simply signified that “demand for Taylor Swift tickets far outweighed the supply.”
“Instead of pricing tickets commensurate with demand, Swift set prices artificially low. As much as it may anger Swifties that were not able to purchase a ticket, there simply were not enough tickets to satisfy the demand,” the coalition wrote.
Regarding the FTC, Club for Growth’s president David McIntosh told the Reporter that
“Biden and his cronies are trying to use antitrust laws in a frantic attempt to cover for their own disastrous policies that have ushered in the worst inflation crisis since the Carter Administration.”
Read the full letter HERE.