Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
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Lincoln lamented that his generals were chronically afflicted with the “slows.” They rarely advanced. Today
Reagan's FTC has a near fatal case of the “slows”—never have so many labored so energetically to produce so
little. And if inaction were not consumer injury enough, Reagan's generals on the consumer protection and an-
titrust fronts display alarming retrograde symptoms—retreating from 60 years of progress in strengthening the
law against deception; surrendering whole chapters of the antitrust laws and engaging in economic frolics and
detours, corporate over-reaching and consumer exploitation
.
So reads the opening salvo in a scathing four-hundred-page report on the dismantling of the Federal Trade
Commission, the agency responsible for policing anticompetitive business practices. The report, prepared
for Congress by its commissioner, Michael Pertschuk, at the end of his term in 1984, is a blistering assess-
ment of the Reagan administration's destruction of the very foundations of antitrust and consumer protection
laws established by Congress.
Reagan's election signaled the new era of laissez-faire economics, an eighteenth-century economic theory
that attacked any government intervention in business affairs, including regulation, taxes, tariffs, or antitrust
laws. The approach was rehabilitated as the “free market” by Milton Friedman, embraced by Alan Green-
span and the other architects of today's economy, and enshrined in legislative and regulatory policies over
the past thirty years. Consolidation of industry, one of its main planks, has the obvious goal of concentrating
wealth. Although this was justified for creating economies of scale and economic efficiency, the associated
antitrust violations have been documented in recent decades to be major job killers.
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Pertschuk, infuriated by the attack on the agency that began in 1981, refused to leave without a fight. He
had been the Senate staffer responsible for facilitating legislation banning TV advertising of cigarettes and
was appointed by Jimmy Carter to the FTC on the recommendation of influential consumer advocate Ralph
Nader. Now retired, Pertschuk says that the tragedy of the assault on the FTC was that the agency had gone
through a renaissance in the 1970s.
2
During the Nixon, Ford, and Carter years, FTC commissioners had built up the agency's antitrust enforce-
ment capabilities, strengthening the regional offices that investigated and developed cases against violators.
But under Reagan's appointee James C. Miller (referred to in
Chapter 2
), the agency waged a “budgetary
purge of law enforcement staff” and invited previously shunned practices, including “frequent mergers of
competitors, a greater willingness to flout antitrust prohibitions, and a flood of companies petitioning the
FTC for elimination or weakening of prior Commission orders.”
3
Chairman Miller was a strident ideologue from the American Enterprise Institute. Pertschuk describes
him as coming to the commission with an easily described agenda: “Government bad, private sector good.
He was opposed to any intervention in corporate misbehavior or enforcement of antitrust law.” Pertschuk
goes on to say that Miller “drove us crazy.” He was a “very unpleasant individual characterized by the tend-
ency to ingratiate himself with people higher in the hierarchy and bully those that worked for him.”
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