Biden’s Competition Council Targets Free Enterprise, Expands Government

Joe Biden’s Competition Council, created by his executive order dubbed “Promoting Competition In the American Economy,” celebrated its second anniversary and convened its fifth meeting this week.

Biden himself kicked off the proceedings, proclaiming “Folks are tired of being played for suckers” by business.

It was a busy day with “Fact Sheets” boasting of the administration’s regulatory forays into transportation, food and agriculture, technology and internet services, labor, health, banking and finance — with more promised intervention to come.

The White House self-reports doing wonders and sprouting cucumbers, claiming to be lowering shipping costs, expanding broadband access, protecting workers’ rights, making hearing aids available without prescriptions, reducing drug prices, supporting small businesses, promoting transparency in pricing and reducing what it calls “junk fees” in the likes of the credit card, airline, and hospitality sectors, and using its muscle to reduce bank overdraft and bounced-check fees.

Some moves are good steps. But as everybody’s Grandma likes to say, when you’re pointing at someone else, there are three fingers pointed back at you.

Bidens top-down (not “bottom-up, middle-out” as he claims) proclivities consist of “whole-of-government” cross-agency collusions that inappropriately resurrect discredited antitrust theories, plus single out already hyper-regulated industries for demonization over the likes of disrupted supply chains and inflation.

Read the full article on Forbes.