[thu2111]

But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.

Governments are nowhere near that level of rigour or coherency, especially if you look at EU anti-trust. The USA at least requires the government to demonstrate some actual harm to consumers in court. EU anti-trust requires a single bureaucrat to decide that competitors were harmed, and they can then levy any fine they like which goes straight into the EU Commission's coffers. It can only be appealed in some sort of court after the fine is paid, and the court is packed with judges who want to see the EU expand (via spending), so that's cold comfort.

That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.

Many arguments about anti-trust do implicitly assume the US model, which at least has some tenuous connection to harm to the general public. That isn't really true internationally, yet ramped up anti-trust in the USA would absolutely be taken as a green light by other parts of the world to whack US firms with enormous fines for conduct that isn't actually bad in any way.

[arrosenberg]

> But anti-trust law is vague, and violations are often in the eye of the beholder. A sports game is also the wrong analogy because sports games have very clearly defined rules, specifically to avoid referees picking winners.

Have you ever watched sports? The referee always has an impact whether they blow the whistle or not. Every rule requires some level of interpretation or fitting to a given situation. Some sports (mainly soccer) don't have rules, they explicitly have "laws of the game" because it's understood that they are to be interpreted.

> That approach is incoherent: the whole point of capitalist competition is that the better firm in some sense harms the weaker firm by taking away its customers. And giving the referee the power to transfer money from the competitors to their own pockets at will, without needing to convince anyone else at all, is clearly an enormous conflict of interest.

...you know regulators don't get to keep any money right? Their job is to set market rules, enforce them, and break up any competitor who gains too much market power. Where exactly is the conflict of interest? Historically, most shareholders wind up making more money off the future value of the broken-up interests than they did with the original conglomerate.

It seems like you are arguing from an EU standpoint, and I don't know anything about their antitrust history, so I'm not going to try and defend or interpret what Europe does.

[thu2111]

you know regulators don't get to keep any money right?

This is exactly my point. They don't ... in America. In the EU anti-trust fines are both created by and collected by the Commission, specifically, a high ranking Commissioner. Those people are selected not for any particular expertise in their subject area but rather nominated by countries and selected for political reasons. The money goes straight into the general budget of the Commissioner's employer, and then handed out in "solidarity" payments, subsidies, bureaucrat salaries and other priorities of the Commission.

[pyuser583]

Bureaucrats have their own set of incentives. They can increase their position within the bureaucracy, and increase the bureaucracy’s influence.

One of the reasons Americans are so “anti-bureaucracy” is because of precious bureaucratic oversteps.

It’s pretty well established the EUs administrators strongly value the influence I’d their own agencies (with some exceptions).

A good US example is the military. Army, Navy, Marines, etc. are in constant competition. Do any of the generals or admirals get to take home their funding?