A silent belief in authoritarian values

The ideological certainty with which FTC Commissioner Lina Khan explains her latest investigation into Microsoft reveals the zeitgeist of our time. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, she explains that Microsoft may have violated antitrust law — or rather policy and politics, since it’s not really law — by consensually hiring the co-founder of startup Inflection AI and almost all of his staff, and to offset the ongoing concerns with licensing costs. . Watch the video with the story “FTC opens antitrust investigation into Microsoft AI deal”, June 6, 2024. It is with the most reasonable political correctness that Mrs. Khan declares:

There is increasing recognition in Washington that as a government we cannot simply completely stand back and step aside.

I wonder at what fleeting moment Joe Biden’s nominated young law professor thinks the federal government was “completely distant” and “out of the way.” It would be interesting to know what evidence she has to support her claim.

She also says:

You’re right that this will look different in some ways. … And we as policy makers and we as a society can help make decisions and choices that will steer the technologies on a path that actually serves us, instead of a model in which a handful of companies just get more and more out of society, makers and people feel like they have no story.

Who are ‘we as policy makers’ and ‘we as society’? Are the two political ‘us’ the same? Don’t “we as policy makers” represent at best 50% +1 of “we as society”? And that’s the best case. I suspect that our political bureaucrat in Washington has not thought much about these issues and has an intuitive and naive view of democracy. Twentieth-century welfare economics and social choice theory, often developed by economists who, like Mrs. Khan, had a sweet tooth for economic and social planning, showed that “we as a society” raise problems of aggregating preferences that only can be solved by authoritarianism – ‘dictatorship’, in the terms of Kenneth Arrow’s famous thesis. Only a society of identical individuals can imagine saying “we” (with our collective mouths). James Buchanan and Public Choice Economics added a realistic view of “us as policymakers” and a more sensible view of democracy.

In reality, Ms. Khan’s “we as policymakers” conceals an authoritarian desire to control society:

At the FTC, we examine the whole stack, from the chip, to the computing cloud, to the models, to the apps. … The raw material for many of these tools is in the hands of a very small number of companies. … There can be self-dealing, there can be discrimination, there can be exclusion, so that the big boys just get bigger at the expense of everyone else.

Ms. Khan seems to be unconsciously admitting that her crusade is part of a general ideology of top-down social engineering.

Could it be that Microsoft and Inflection structured their deal so that it doesn’t conflict with what the regulatory state doesn’t like? That is certainly a possibility. It’s a scary possibility, but not in the way Khan seems to imagine. The rule of law does not consist of a majority government that uses a broad and growing complex of laws and rules to prevent everything that ‘we as policy makers’ don’t like and to impose everything that ‘we as policy makers’ want. Such a view of government represents a “government of men” (okay, make it “of persons”) and not a “government of laws.” With the proliferation of laws and regulations, at least one legal instrument must now exist for any potential power grab. Refusing to see this suggests a neglect of both the economic-scientific study of society and the modern conception of freedom, in favor of an unexamined and dangerous preference for collective over individual choices.

As an instinctive supporter of majoritarian democracy –us as policymakers represent us as the current majority in society-Mrs. Khan should be as happy if Donald Trump is elected chief policymaker as if the crown were given to Joe Biden. In one case the people will have spoken just as in the other. Framing the problem in these terms suggests that the danger of collective choice on both right and left is the same as we know it: under a strong leader, “we” impose “our” preferences on the rest of the “we.” There is an urgent need to think outside the political framework.

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