Latest news with #Meador
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
A Top Antitrust Enforcer Is Open To Prosecuting People Who Disagree With Him
The Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) Mark Meador recently insinuated that his agency may investigate nonprofits and academic institutions that object to antitrust enforcement actions without disclosing their donors for deceptive practices. While Meador may think it's OK to probe parties for disagreeing with him, the FTC's consumer protection remit does not sanction prosecuting those who reject the commissioner's antitrust ideology. Meador recently reposted a video of him discussing the "academic whitewashing" of antitrust during an event hosted by American Compass and the Conservative Partnership Institute on May 1. (While no full recording of the event exists at press time, an employee of American Compass tells Reason that the clip is from the aforementioned event.) Meador complains about academics "renting out their Ph.D. [and] their reputation to advocate for the interests of giant corporations." He rightly acknowledged that people are free to do whatever they want but then said that the FTC brings "enforcement actions against influencers and reviewers who advocate for products without disclosing that they're being paid for it." Meador wondered aloud whether nonprofit employees and academics who advocate "for the interests of certain corporations or mergers in their white papers and their op-eds without ever disclosing that they're being paid to do so" may also be guilty of deceptive practices. He did not state that the FTC would bring enforcement actions against academics but said it's "worth investigating." While Meador may think "it's an interesting question" whether he may prosecute his ideological opponents, the Supreme Court has already provided an answer. Eugene Volokh, professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, understands the ruling in NAACP v. Alabama (1958) as holding that, "when it comes to speech that is neither commercial advertising for a product…nor specifically election-related, broader First Amendment precedents would indeed preclude such disclosure requirements." Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union and senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tells Reason that "the Supreme Court has expressly distinguished between commercial and other communications." Citing Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel of Supreme Court of Ohio (1985), Strossen says "compulsory disclosure regarding non-commercial expression is presumptively unconstitutional." John Vecchione, senior litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, says that what Meador proposes the FTC do runs afoul of the Supreme Court's decision in National Rifle Association of American v. Vullo (2024). In this case, the Court unanimously ruled that "the First Amendment prohibits government officials from wielding their power selectively to punish or suppress speech." Vecchione says that, were the FTC to investigate nonprofits for their speech, it "would be stopped so fast your head would spin." Meador is wrong to suggest that the FTC, which regulates commercial speech, can police the kind engaged in by academics and nonprofits. Ethan Yang, adjunct research fellow at the American Institute of Economic Research, explains that "there is a vast difference between a [firm] paying a celebrity to endorse their product and an academic who is employed by a university or non-profit that takes diverse donations from a variety of different entities." Jessica Melugin, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells Reason that "Meador is conflating commercial speech…with academic speech" and that government intervention in the latter is obviously inappropriate. It is unclear how serious Meador is about prosecuting those whose opinions he deems ill-motivated. Regardless of Meador's intentions, he's "cast[ing] those who disagree with him as only motivated by material interests and not intellectually sincere," says Yang. Instead of speculating about the motives of his ideological opponents, Meador should compete in the open marketplace of ideas—after all, his job is to preserve competition. The post A Top Antitrust Enforcer Is Open To Prosecuting People Who Disagree With Him appeared first on
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Antitrust Enforcer Says 'Big Is Bad'
The anti–free market views of the Trump administration's antitrust enforcers are coming into full view, and it's boding poorly for the American economy. Abigail Slater, assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, recently delivered her "America First Antitrust" speech, which outlined a populist agenda that punishes firms for being large. Days later, Mark Meador, commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, published his "Antitrust Policy for the Conservative" essay, which evinces prejudice against big companies. "Big is bad," says Meador, who calls on conservatives to "reaffirm that concentrated economic power is just as dangerous as concentrated political power." Meador does not explain how market power is morally analogous to political power and the use of coercion but challenges conservatives to oppose bigness in private business the way they do in government. But there's good reason to be against one and not the other. Increasing the size and scope of government entails a commensurate reduction of the private sphere and personal liberty; Microsoft, Walmart, and Häagen-Dazs increasing their market shares does not. Meador disagrees, describing antitrust law as the means to prevent "anarchistic private tyranny" and encourages conservatives to "reject a laissez-faire or libertarian approach to antitrust law." Meador associates the libertarian approach principally with legal scholar Robert Bork's consumer welfare standard, which holds that the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), the oldest antitrust statute enforced by the DOJ and FTC, was intended to and should promote economic efficiency. Meador rejects Bork's understanding of consumer welfare as economic efficiency, narrowly redefining it as "trading partner surplus." Replacing a holistic conception of consumer welfare with Meador's myopic one will prevent even economically efficient mergers and acquisitions from taking place, retarding innovation and productivity—a cost that Meador is willing for consumers to pay. Meador says that a conservative approach to antitrust law should be "more concerned with avoiding Type II errors [false negatives] than Type I errors [false positives]." This means antitrust officials should be more worried about accidentally allowing anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions than preventing competitive ones. Slater, however, lauded antitrust for its ability "to make targeted, incisive cuts to remove the cancer of collusion and monopoly abuse [rather than imposing] ex ante regulations." Slater praises antitrust for minimizing unnecessary economic intervention, which allows firms to serve consumers and expand the economic pie. Meador contradicts the DOJ's top antitrust official by calling for precisely the opposite. Meador describes permissionless innovation as a progressive impulse and says, "We do not celebrate the inexorable forward march of progress precisely because not all that is innovative is good." Skepticism of innovation recalls the Biden administration's permission-slip economy, which cost the economy an estimated $1.8 trillion. Meador also observes that "monopolists…often innovate to entrench and protect their monopoly rather than disrupt it." This is true; firms innovate to differentiate their products to obtain and retain pricing power to increase their profits. For example, Apple introduced the graphical user interface in January 1983 to steal Microsoft's market share, whose MS-DOS was a cumbersome command-line operating system. The primary beneficiary of such innovation is the consumer; the firm's motivation is irrelevant. Moreover, the example Meador cites as evidence of innovation not benefiting the consumer is that which profits from a government-granted monopoly over its intellectual property: the pharmaceutical industry. The solution to this inefficiency is less economic intervention by the state, not more of it. When firms are incapable of differentiating their products through in-house innovation, "there is still the possibility of acquisition to obviate the competitive threat," says Meador, citing the technology sector as an example. Meador recognizes that "the potential for acquisition has led to an explosion in VC funding for start-ups" and says this has diminished "truly disruptive innovation." While economists don't know if acquired startups' innovations reached their "full potential," Big Tech's Magnificent Seven—Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla—accounted for over half of the S&P 500 index's 25 percent return and one-third of total U.S. market capitalization in 2024. Cracking down on Big Tech acquisitions decreases the expected profitability of acquiring startups (as antitrust enforcers intend), thereby disincentivizing entrepreneurship and innovation as an unintended result. Meador quotes Sen. John Sherman—the namesake of the aforementioned act, which has been used by the Trump and Biden administrations to prosecute Alphabet for its successful search engine (Google)—who said, "If the concentrated powers of this combination are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government." Meador, like Sherman, does not identify a principle to determine when the exercise of private property rights amounts to the exertion of a "kingly prerogative." If anyone is exercising such a prerogative it is President Donald Trump, who is using political power to act as "a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life," as Sherman was so worried, with his unconstitutional tariffs, subsidies, and industrial policy that arbitrarily reallocate capital to favored industries. Yet, the New Right opposes free trade even as they admit Trump's protectionism will impoverish Americans. Meador is unqualifiedly right that economics cannot identify what a person's or society's ends should be. He is also right that economics (like all sciences) "depends upon various assumptions and caveats, all of which can and often is rendered moot by marketplace realities and 'facts on the ground.'" As such, it is fallacious to claim that economic analysis of the anticipated effects of mergers, acquisitions, and other firm conduct can prescribe what the government should do—it can only attempt to describe what will happen. The limitations of the consumer welfare standard are reason for humility in its application, not its redefinition. Meador concludes conservatives must reject what he says are libertarianism's lies, but conservatives should reject Meador's false equivalency of economic and political power. The post Trump's Antitrust Enforcer Says 'Big Is Bad' appeared first on
Reuters
10-04-2025
- Business
- Reuters
US Senate confirms Trump's FTC commissioner pick
April 10 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump's pick for the third Republican commissioner on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, despite criticism from Democrats over Trump's move to oust two commissioners from the consumer protection and antitrust agency. The confirmation of Mark Meador, a partner at law firm Kressin Meador Powers and former antitrust counsel to Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, gives Republicans a majority on the FTC, whether or not a court reinstates the two Democratic commissioners who say they were illegally fired. Meador previously worked as an antitrust attorney at the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice. At his confirmation hearing in February, Meador emphasized the importance of antitrust enforcement in tackling high prices on consumer goods. "Protecting competition in all of our markets is essential to ensuring that America's free market economy operates as our servant, not our master," Meador said. On Thursday, fired commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya raised concerns that staff from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would have improper access to FTC data. At his February hearing, Meador said about DOGE data access that the FTC "will follow the laws that it enforces as well as the laws that restrict it," referring to provisions that keep merger and other data confidential within the agency.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US Senate confirms Trump's FTC commissioner pick
By Jody Godoy (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump's pick for the third Republican commissioner on the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, despite criticism from Democrats over Trump's move to oust two commissioners from the consumer protection and antitrust agency. The confirmation of Mark Meador, a partner at law firm Kressin Meador Powers and former antitrust counsel to Republican U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, gives Republicans a majority on the FTC, whether or not a court reinstates the two Democratic commissioners who say they were illegally fired. Meador previously worked as an antitrust attorney at the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice. At his confirmation hearing in February, Meador emphasized the importance of antitrust enforcement in tackling high prices on consumer goods. "Protecting competition in all of our markets is essential to ensuring that America's free market economy operates as our servant, not our master," Meador said. On Thursday, fired commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya raised concerns that staff from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would have improper access to FTC data. At his February hearing, Meador said about DOGE data access that the FTC "will follow the laws that it enforces as well as the laws that restrict it," referring to provisions that keep merger and other data confidential within the agency.
Yahoo
15-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Wheelchair pool tournament planned to benefit paralyzed veterans
The risk of being killed or becoming permanently disabled in the line of duty is a sacrifice those who serve in the military take as they place service above self. In an effort to help those who now suffer from various forms of paralysis after serving their country, Greenville's VFW Post 4011 plans to host a wheelchair pool tournament to raise money for the Lone Star Chapter of Paralyzed Veterans of America. PVA is a nonprofit organization that donates mobility equipment to paralyzed veterans, lobbies with legislators on their behalf and also organizes athletic and recreational activities for disabled veterans. Scheduled to start at noon on April 12, the entry fee to play in the VFW's wheelchair pool tournament will be $30, with half going to the benefit and half going to the tournament. While the tournament requires that participants use wheelchairs while playing, it is also open to people who don't actually have to use a wheelchair in their daily lives and wheelchairs will be provided at the event for people who don't have one. The VFW outlines the following rules: - Players must sit on the seat or cushion of their wheelchair while playing a shot. - The shooter's buttocks cannot be higher than 27 inches from the surface the wheelchair rolls on. - The shooter must have at least one cheek on the seat or seat pad. - Players must keep their feet off the floor while playing a shot. - Players cannot use their legs or stumps as leverage against the table or wheelchair. - Players can use cue extensions, special bridges and other assistive devices. - Another person can hold the bridge for the player, but cannot help with the stroke of the cue. - Another person can help the player roll around the table, but cannot touch the wheelchair during the shot. 'This is a tournament for everyone to have a good time while helping raise money for paralyzed Veterans,' Mary Leonard Meador with the Greenville VFW said. Those who would like to play in the tournament can contact Meador by calling the VFW at (903) 455-9085.
