ANTITRUST SYMPOSIUM: COMPETITION AS PUBLIC POLICY
The United States has long organized its economy based on the principle that free markets characterized by robust competition will produce the greatest benefits to the nation’s citizens. Although the U.S. economic system has hardly been free of government regulation or other intervention, it nonetheless has largely preserved competition, protected through antitrust law, as its fundamental underpinning. Indeed, over the past 30 years, as the U.S. economy has matured and changed, our policy-makers have substantially deregulated several significant industries. And for nearly 20 years, developing nations around the globe have looked to the United States and other developed economies as models as they endeavor to transition to market-based economies.
Then came 2008. With global financial markets in turmoil and a substantial economic downturn, the superiority of free markets and the ability of competition to serve them is being challenged in the United States and even more so abroad. It is no overstatement to say that capitalism as we know it is under attack. Not surprisingly, heavier government regulation of markets is being touted as the solution. But will even well-intentioned regulation squelch innovation and entrepreneurship and ultimately reduce consumer welfare ?
The Obama Administration and Congress will be making crucial decisions that will impact our nation’s economic system – and that of the world – for many years to come. Undoubtedly, U.S. policy-makers and others around the globe will engage in debates that often will come down to two important, interlocking questions: Does competition in the market provide the surest way to improve our citizens’ welfare? And what degree of government intervention in the market is necessary, helpful, or harmful to enhancing our citizens’ welfare?
Through this symposium, a host of experts will explore whether competition should and will continue to serve as the foundation for economic policy and legislation. We will begin with a review of where we have been – a broad discussion of the history of competition and regulation in U.S. public policy and lessons learned. We then will drill down into two industries that, to varying degrees, underwent the transition from extensive to lighter regulation, relying on competition to discipline market behavior: Airlines and Electricity. There is much primarily to be learned from these “natural experiments.”
From there, we will hold two separate panels on industries of great relevance in the current environment. In a panel on Financial Markets, experts will explore the raging debates on the current situation in these crucial markets, e.g., whether it is the lack of regulation and oversight or misplaced government interventions in an otherwise competitive market that led to the crisis, and whether government bailouts and new regulation provide the answers. Also of great significance, another panel will address health care – high on the agenda of the Obama administration -- and the role that competition should play in the delivery of goods and services.
A final panel of experts will explore generally the role of government’s “visible hand” in using taxpayer money to direct the economic system, from bailouts of individual companies to building national champions, drawing from the experiences of the European Union in regulating “state aid.”
The goal of the symposium is to derive, from past experience and the current debate among experts, a set of principles that can guide policy-makers, who undoubtedly will be under pressure to “just do something,” towards choosing the approach that best serves consumers over the long term.
Registration Information
