30

FEDERAL TRADE
COMMISSION
Adam Candeub

MISSION/OVERVIEW

America’s antitrust laws are over a century old. In 1890, the U.S. Congressenacted the Sherman Act,1 the first federal prohibition on trusts and restraints oftrade. The Clayton Act,2 adopted in 1914, builds upon the Sherman Act, outlawing
certain practices, such as price fixing, while bringing other business combinations,such as mergers and acquisitions, under regulatory scrutiny.
The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTCA),3 also adopted in 1914, gives thefederal government legal tools to combat anticompetitive, unfair, and deceptive
practices in the marketplace, empowering the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to
enforce provisions of the Sherman and Clayton Acts. The FTCA prohibits “unfair
methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting
commerce.” Sections 3, 7, and 8 of the Clayton Act empower the FTC to block
unlawful tying contracts, unlawful corporate mergers and acquisitions, and interlocking directorates. Under an amendment to the FTCA, the Robinson–Patman
Act,4 the FTC has authority to prohibit practices involving discriminatory pricing
and product promotion. While the FTC has enforcement or administrative responsibilities under more than 70 laws, the FTCA and the Clayton Act are the focus of
its regulatory energy.
FTC actions, therefore, turn on the antitrust principles and market principles
it adopts. Modern approaches to antitrust stress that the objective of antitrust law
is to assure a competitive economy—which in economic terms maximizes bothallocative efficiency (optimal distribution of goods and services, taking into accountconsumer’s preferences, so that prices tend toward marginal cost) and productive— 869 —

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise

efficiency (using the least amount of resources for optimal output)—and thereby
maximizes consumer welfare.5
Recently, however, many in the conservative movement have taken a broader
view of antitrust. They point out that the authors of our antitrust laws did notintend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and thenormative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation. First, theseprinciples were only imperfectly worked out at the time the antitrust laws werepassed. Second, contemporaneous statements concerning the Sherman and Clayton Acts demonstrate Congress’s concern about the political and economic powerof the oil and railroad trusts of the first Gilded Age, and their influence on democratic institutions and civil society. Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’
baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplaceof ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive
behavior with government.
Republican Senator John Sherman explained to Congress in support of his
eponymous legislation:
If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure aking over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries
of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an
autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price ofany commodity.6

Similarly, identifying the institutional threats that market concentration canpose, the former Republican President and future Supreme Court Justice William
Howard Taft wrote at the time,
The federal antitrust law is one of the most important statutes ever passedin this country. It was a step taken by Congress to meet what the public had
found to be a growing and intolerable evil in combinations between many
who had capital employed in a branch of trade, industry, or transportation, toobtain control of it, regulate prices, and make unlimited profit.

Taft saw in this economic threat broader implications for American society
since “the building of great and powerful corporations which had, many of them,intervened in politics and through use of corrupt machines and bosses threatened
us with a plutocracy.”7
Others in the conservative movement have maintained for numerous decadesthat an economic justification is the only coherent approach to the antitrust laws.
Many view the first 90 years of U.S. antitrust policy as unprincipled in its approach,often resulting in policies that, by trying to protect smaller competitors, ended up— 870 —

2025 Presidential Transition Projectraising prices for consumers. Judge Robert Bork in his influential book The Antitrust Paradox found economic justifications for previously denounced behavior
including small horizontal mergers, all vertical and conglomerate mergers, verticalprice maintenance and market division agreements, tying arrangements, exclusive
dealings and requirements contracts, “predatory” price cutting, and price “discrimination.” Bork also defended corporate “bigness” if it came about through internal
growth or acceptable mergers. He also defended agreements between competitors
on prices, territories, refusals to deal, and other “suppressions of rivalry” that are“ancillary” to some economic efficiency. The practical contribution of his work was
to put consumer welfare at the heart of competition law.8
Beyond antitrust injury, we are witnessing in today’s markets the use of economic power—often market and perhaps even monopoly power—to undermine
democratic institutions and civil society. Practices such as Environmental, Social,and Governance (ESG) requirements on publicly traded corporations and their
inclusion in business agreements, the so-called “de-banking” of industries andindividuals, and the interference of large internet firms with democratic political
discourse undermine liberal democracy, a truly open society, and, indeed, rule oflaw. Without rule of law, markets themselves will wither.9
Critical of the “social responsibility” agenda, Milton Friedman in his provocatively titled essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its
Profits” states,[T]here is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its
resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so longas it stays in the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and freecompetition, without deception or fraud.10

For Friedman, market mechanisms, not political mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses. Business
managers appropriate shareholder wealth when they use corporate resources tofurther their personal political beliefs, even when pursuing what they consider
a “socially responsible” or “moral” agenda. The business of American business isbusiness, not ideology.
More broadly, there is less and less debate around the growth of monopoly rents
throughout the U.S. economy. The current data strongly suggest that U.S. corporations are systematically earning far higher profits than they were 25 or 30 years
ago. Combined with other evidence that large corporations are accounting for an
increasing share of revenue and employment, it certainly appears that many large
U.S. corporations are earning substantial incumbency rents, and have been doing
so for at least 15 years, apart from during the depths of the Great Recession thatbegan in 2008.

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While the explanations for this shift are not clear, what is particularly disturbing
is the possibility that these rents are extracted at least in part through regulatory
capture—which can function as a bar to entrance for new competitors. In addition,
the sheer cost of compliance with regulation favors large firms, which can more
efficiently spread the cost of regulation over a larger revenue base and have theresources to invest in sophisticated government relations. The FTC must consider,therefore, the role of government itself in maintaining market concentration inareas ranging from pharmaceuticals and healthcare to avionics, banking, and realestate brokerage.
Beyond undermining small businesses and reducing their salubrious moral
effect on American civil society, concentration of economic power facilitates collusion between government and private actors, undermining the rule of law. The
continued emergence of evidence documenting collusion—between the Big Techinternet platforms and the Biden White House and administrative agencies—tocensor criticism, scientific fact, and uncomfortable political truths demonstrates
this unfortunate development.
But, there are some caveats. First, the FTC lacks the power to revisit developments
in antitrust laws, which have brought an invaluable rigor to the antitrust law—matters such as analyzing vertical integration, for example. Nor should it. Second, theFTC’s recent rescinding of its 2015 Policy Statement was undoubtedly ill-considered.11 Of course, the consumer welfare standard must guide FTC action, but, inappropriate situations and with strong evidence, this standard must be expanded
to include more factors than just price. Further, a similar standard of proof used toestablish that a practice challenged by the Commission causes harm to competition
must also apply in demonstrating the efficiencies that justify the practices.
President Harry Truman reportedly made the famous quip, “Give me a onehanded economist. All my economists say ‘on the one hand…’, then ‘but on theother.’” When it comes to some of the more vexing issues in antitrust regulation,
the conservative movement is in the same predicament. Many wish to preserve theproductivity and efficiency focus of an economic-based consumer welfare standard
approach to antitrust enforcements; others are more willing to look at the effectsof business concentration in certain industries on innovation, the institutional
resilience of our democracy, and children’s development. The following discussion
sets forth policy principles and initiatives on which there was agreement among
the contributors to this chapter, and notes and explains where there was dissent.
NEEDED REFORMS

Should the FTC Enforce Antitrust—or Even Continue to Exist? Some
conservatives think that antitrust enforcement should be invested solely in the
Department of Justice (DOJ). The FTC’s commissioners are not removable at willby the President, which many quite reasonably believe violates the Vesting Clause— 872 —

2025 Presidential Transition Projectof Article II of the Constitution; it is for this reason that conservatives have long
believed in either ending law enforcement activities of independent agencies orending their independent status. The Supreme Court ruling in Humphrey’s Executor12 upholding agency independence seems ripe for revisiting—and perhaps sooner
than later.13
Others think that the post–New Deal expansion of the administrative state
has had baleful effects upon our society and earnestly share the hope that it canbe greatly curtailed if not eliminated—or that its authority can be returned to thestates and other democratically accountable political institutions. But, until there
is a return to a constitutional structure that the Founding Fathers would have recognized and a massive shrinking of the administrative state, conservatives cannot
unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda. As experience shows, the administrative state will grow and further
its own agenda, often at odds with conservative thought, even under conservative
leadership. Unless conservatives take a firm hand to the bureaucracy and marshal
its power to defend a freedom-promoting agenda, nothing will stop the bureaucracy’s anti–free market, leftist march.
ESG Practices as a Cover for Anticompetitive Activity and Possible
Unfair Trade Practices. It has long been suspected, and is now increasingly
documented, that corporate social advocacy on issues ranging from “Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) to the “environmental, social, and governance”(ESG) movement also serves to launder corporate reputation and perhaps obtainfavorable treatment from government actors. In a recent Senate Judiciary hearing, Senator Josh Hawley asked FTC Chair Lina Khan if the FTC had conditioned
merger reviews on ESG or critical race theories adopted by the firms involved.
Khan responded by saying that she turned down deals when firms offered social
justice policies in return for approving unlawful deals. In response to a similar
question from Senator Tom Cotton, Khan responded that firms try to come to the
FTC to get out of antitrust liability by offering climate, diversity, or other forms of
ESG-type offerings, but that there is no ESG loophole in the antitrust laws.14
Her comments suggest that there is a movement of firms attempting to use
both ESG and DEI as a sort of reputational laundering to avoid enforcement ofpotentially criminal activity. The FTC should set up an ESG/DEI collusion task
force to investigate firms—particularly in private equity—to see if they are using
the practice as a means to meet targets, fix prices, or reduce output.
lCongress should investigate ESG practices as a cover for
anticompetitive activity and possible unfair trade practices.

The business of American business is business, not ideology. The privileges
extended to corporations in American society come with the expectation that— 873 —

Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise

they will pursue profits for shareholders, bringing about economic growth.
Managers, particularly in publicly traded corporations, who use their power toadvance sets of fashionable moral beliefs, such as ESG/DEI, introduce agency
problems into the shareholder relationship and appropriate corporate wealthfor their own benefit.
Milton Friedman recognized this problem decades ago when answering thequestion whether businesses have ethical or social obligations, as was mentioned
above. Contrary to his detractors, Friedman did not defend “greed is good.” Rather,according to Friedman, socially responsible activities conducted by a corporation
distort economic freedom because shareholders do not decide how their money
will be spent—increasing the possibility for fraud or management opportunism.
This is especially the case in concentrated industries with market power.15
Managers who insert their own values into underwriting agreements, contracts
for professional services, or other business transactions coopt shareholder value
for their own personal utility. This is an unfair trade practice, particularly when it
occurs in industries that enjoy market power and special privileges or relationships
with the government.
Cancel Culture, Collusion, and Commerce. As a corollary, businesses thatmake general offers of service to the public forego profits by refusing to service
a lawful activity, i.e., fossil fuel extraction or gun manufacturing, raising similar
concerns. When banks or internet platforms refuse customers based on theirpolitical or social views (as distinguished from religious views), they forgo profits.
While such decisions are often justified on public relations, marketing, or branding
grounds—and normally such decisions, reflecting business judgment, should andwould receive deference, this presumption is harder to make in a highly partisan, ideologically divided America. This type of behavior can rise to the level of an
unfair trade practice when the business is (1) publicly traded; (2) highly regulated;(3) enjoys legal privileges; (4) enjoys market power; and (5) appears to engage in
its own political or social agenda that is unrelated to any conceivable branding
concerns. The government, as guided by democratically passed laws, already regulates activities such as fossil fuel extraction and gun manufacturing. Businesses,
particularly those that enjoy certain government privileges or relationships and/or market power, should not replace democratic decision-making with their own
judgment on controversial matters.
A related concern is the degree to which concentration of industries, particularly in pharmaceuticals, health care, and the internet, encourages government
collusion that undermines democratic institutions. Collusion can be explicit, in thecase for example of government working with social media companies to censor
politically harmful news, or more implicit—for example, regulatory requirementsso burdensome that they deter market entrance by smaller entities without theresources to bear them.

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2025 Presidential Transition ProjectProtecting Children Online. The FTC has long protected children in a variety
of different contexts. Internet platforms profit from obtaining information fromchildren without parents’ knowledge or consent—and social media’s effect on thewell-being of American children is well-documented. Around 2012, American
teens experienced a dramatic decline in wellness. Depression, self-harm, suicide
attempts, and suicide all increased sharply among U.S. adolescents between 2011
and 2019,16 with similar trends worldwide.17 The increase occurred at the sametime that social media use moved from rare to ubiquitous among teens,18 makingsocial media a prime suspect for the sudden rise in mental health issues among
teens. In addition, excessive social media use is strongly linked to mental healthissues among individuals. Several studies strongly support the notion that social
media use is a cause, not just a correlation, of subjective well-being and poor
mental health.19
Social media and other large platforms form millions of contracts every yearwith American children. And even though a minor can void most contracts into
which he or she enters, most jurisdictions have laws that hold minors accountable
for the benefits received under the contract. Thus, children can make enforceable
contracts for which parents could end up bearing responsibility. Targeting children to create potentially harmful contracts or making parents responsible forsuch contractual relationships is an unfair trade practice. The FTC, therefore, has
the authority, interest, and duty to protect children online from such contractual
relationships.
l

The FTC should examine platforms’ advertising and contractmaking with children as a deceptive or unfair trade practice, perhaps
requiring written parental consent.

Currently, the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA)20 regulates theinformation internet firms can obtain from children. COPPA fails because it (1)only protects children under the age of 13, leaving older teenagers completely
unprotected and (2) only prohibits platforms from collecting information from achild using “actual knowledge” rather than abiding by the “constructive knowledge”
standard, which prohibits collecting information from a user reasonably assumed
to be underage. The FTC has rulemaking authority under this statute but has done
little with this authority, nor can it—given the statutory constraints. However,l

The FTC can and should institute unfair trade practices proceedings
against entities that enter into contracts with children withoutparental consent. Personal parental responsibility is, of course, key, but
the law must respect, not undermine, lawful parental authority.

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Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise

Other conservatives are more skeptical concerning the effect of online experience on the young, comparing the concern about social media to concern about
video games, television, and bicycle safety. They point out, as does Cato fellow
Jeffrey A. Singer, that the psychiatric profession has yet to designate “internet
addiction” or “social media addiction” as a mental disorder in the authoritative
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR).21 These conservatives also maintain that calling for regulation undermines conservatives’ calls
for parental empowerment on education or vaccines as well as personal parenting
responsibility.
In addition, some of the methods used to regulate children’s internet accesspose the risk of unintended harms. For instance, age verification regulations would
inevitably increase the amount of data collection involved, increasing privacy concerns. Users would have to submit to platforms proof of their age, which raises
the risks of data breach or illegitimate data usage by the platforms or bad actors.
Limited-government conservatives would prefer the FTC play an educational roleinstead. That might include best practices or educational programs to empower
parents online.
Antitrust Enforcement. As is evidenced by a relentless focus on bringing Big
Tech lawsuits, state attorneys general (AGs) are far more responsive to their constituents than is the FTC. Such a “boots on the ground” approach would benefit
the FTC enormously. Practically, this would mean establishing a distinct role in
the FTC Chairman’s office focused on state AG cooperation and inviting state AGs
to Washington, D.C., to discuss enforcement policy in key sectors under the FTC’s
jurisdiction: Big Tech, hospital mergers, supermarket mergers, and so forth.
FTC regional offices are substantially more in touch with local issues. Over the
past few decades, the reach and influence of regional offices has shrunk dramatically. The FTC should consider returning authority to these offices.
Some conservatives however are less supportive of this idea. Conservative
enthusiasm for the idea of adding regional FTC offices to the states is a break fromthe majority conservative position. Endorsing the federal government as a premier job creator runs counter to decades of conservative opinion that holds that
New Deal agencies and subsequent government bodies should never have beencreated in the first place, and that their red tape and interference is a dominantcause of economic inefficiency. Republicans used to seethe when Democrats tried
to move federal offices into the states. In the early 1990s, House Minority Whip
Newt Gingrich fumed about Senator Robert Byrd’s campaign to transfer certain
national intelligence facilities to West Virginia, calling it a “pure abuse of power.”Some contributors to this chapter would remind conservatives that the unseen
mechanics of redistribution—by which taxpayer money paid to state employees istaken from taxpayers nationwide—is a drag on the economy of the entire country.
Many conservatives fear that it would be impossible to uproot or even prune back— 876 —

2025 Presidential Transition Projecta bureaucracy the seeds of which have been planted in every state. State legislators
would struggle to slash funding from agencies that employ and generously pay
thousands of their constituents. FTC outposts would tie middle America inextricably to big progressive government, remaking the heartland in Washington’s
image. It would be anything but decentralization; Americans need policy makers
to discipline the arrogance that prevails inside the Beltway, not spread it. It would
be “Swamp 2.0”: just as deep and many times as wide.
Big Tech and Antitrust. The large internet platforms have transformed the
U.S. economy, streamlining consumer purchases, networking billions of people,
and altering long-established business practices. Despite their enormous size, they
have avoided significant antitrust liability or prosecution. The reasons for this are
not entirely clear.
It may be because these platforms have been incredibly innovative and havegenerated tremendous efficiencies for our society, with little to no evidence oftraditional consumer harm in the form of higher prices, reduced output, or a lack ofinnovation. Also, Americans report a high level of satisfaction in and trust regarding these companies.
The less friendly regulatory environment in the European Union would makea good case study in expansive antitrust law. The continent boasts not one of the
top 10 global tech companies, while the U.S. can claim eight.22 Some claim thatthe recent drop in value of former leader and current antitrust target Meta, alongwith the rise of new competitors such as Zoom and Chinese-dominated TikTok,
indicates that competitive forces are healthy and at work benefiting consumers
in the tech space.
On the other hand, the platforms challenge traditional economic thinking
because arguably the firm structure they employ is radically different, and theycreate different competition dynamics. First, there is some evidence that the majorinternet platforms have market power, resulting in increased prices for advertisers, costs that very well could be passed onto consumers. For instance, numerous
government studies have found evidence of market power.23 And while some data
show declining advertising costs, they also show increasing prices in this decade.24
Second, while consumers may report that they like social media, hedonics tells
a different story, suggesting that social media and other online activities diminish
human happiness. This evidence, while mixed at first,25 appears to have become
quite solid: Social media makes Americans less happy.26
Third, internet platforms have not created consumer price increases, but ofcourse they provide free services—and this creates a challenge for antitrust regulation. For decades, antitrust economics has been focused on a paradigm in whichfirm and consumer behavior are modeled as functions of price and output as theprimary variables. It may very well be that these models do not fully capture theeffect of technologies that enable increasing returns to scale based on data, such

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as digital platforms. This possibility cannot be lightly discounted, considering thetremendous market power of these firms and their market cap, with the top five
firms of the U.S. market (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla, and Alphabet) responsible for 23.5 percent of the market cap of the S&P 500 index in early December 2021.
The questionable predictive power of traditional economic theory was illustrated when, after a much-heralded investigation, antitrust regulators appointed
by former President Barack Obama declined to sue Google in January 2013 foranticompetitive behavior. The FTC spent 19 months investigating Google overallegations that the search giant was violating antitrust laws by favoring its own
products over those of rival content providers, including eBay, Yelp, TripAdvisor,
Facebook, and Amazon. The probe focused on Google’s control over online searchand search advertising, as well as the company’s growing dominance in mobile
phone software.
According to documents uncovered in press reports,27 the FTC’s economists
successfully argued against initiating antitrust action against the company. Thisdecision was based in large part on a series of predictions that the agency’s staff economic experts made. These predictions turned out to be wrong in several respects.
For instance, according to press accounts, these economic experts saw only “limited potential for growth” in ads that track users across the web—now the backbone
of Google parent company Alphabet’s $182.5 billion in annual revenue. Relying on
theory, the experts downplayed the importance of mobile search, believing thatsearch would continue to be conducted primarily on desktop computers—and
thereby underestimating the effect of Google on Android systems. The experts
predicted that Microsoft, Mozilla, or Amazon would offer viable competition to
Google in mobile search. This decision, of course, occurred in a political environment of close relationships between the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley.
Just as traditional economic theory seems inadequate to the job of understanding Big Tech and predicting its behavior, empirical evidence is very difficult tocome by. This is particularly troublesome. Beyond the fact that most user data
are proprietary, online markets change so quickly that econometric conclusions
are often difficult to make because even if the data are available, they do not exist
for long enough time horizons. Yet, a pattern of highly concentrated firms—with
occasional dropout and replacement by another successor firm with vast market
power—seems to be emerging.
The policy implications of this quandary are not clear, but for the conservative
movement, some believe that some type of policy response is necessary. The dominant internet platforms have disrupted democratic deliberation, as is evidenced by
the Hunter Biden laptop story. They have a propensity to collude with government
to advance political goals, as documents unearthed by the Missouri and Louisiana
AG suits concerning the COVID response demonstrate. And they play a pivotal
role in our economy.

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As Judge Frank Easterbrook famously suggested, regulators should look at thecost of error in their judgments. This argument has usually been used to buttressa tentative and hands off approach to antitrust because judicial error in antitrust
will persist (Type II error) and continue to damage markets, while failure to takeantitrust action (Type I error) will correct itself in the long run as competitors
challenge monopolies.28 However, failing to take antitrust enforcement action(Type I error) includes the possibility of real injury to the structure of important
American institutions such as democratic accountability and free speech. If so, amore proactive approach may be warranted.
Certain online services, such as social media, have an unquestionable negative
utility, particularly on young people, as set forth above. The more “efficient” provision of such services may create more unhappiness. More broadly, the utility
benefits of many online platforms and services are obscure and may be significantly
overstated, as the most recent evidence suggests.29 The FTC must become moresophisticated in measuring consumer surplus. In addition, the FTC should be open
to behavioral explanations, such as habit and small hedonic differences, as keys to
how platforms create and keep market power.30
CONCLUSION

Conservative approaches to antitrust and consumer protection continue totrust markets, not government, to give people what they want and provide theprosperity and material resources Americans need for flourishing, productive,
and meaningful lives. At the same time, conservatives cannot be blind to certain
developments in the American economy that appear to make government–private
sector collusion more likely, threaten vital democratic institutions, such as freespeech, and threaten the happiness and mental well-being of many Americans,particularly children. Many, but not all, conservatives believe that these developments may warrant the FTC’s making a careful recalibration of certain aspects ofantitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The preparation of this chapter was a collective enterprise of individuals involved in the2025 Presidential Transition Project. All contributors to this chapter are listed at the front of this volume, but Rachel
Bovard, John Ehrett, Christopher Iacovella, Jessica Melugin, and Jon Schweppe deserve special mention. The author
alone assumes responsibility for the content of this chapter, and no views expressed herein should be attributed toany other individual.

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ENDNOTES

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

11.

12.
13.

14.

15.
16.

Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1–38.
Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, 15 U.S.C. §§ 12–27.
Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, 15 U.S.C. §§ 41–58.
The Robinson–Patman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§ 13, 13b, and 21a.
Ernest Gellhorn, “An Introduction to Antitrust Economics,” Duke Law Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1975, https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol24/iss1/1 (accessed March 22, 2023).
Charles A. Boston, “The Spirit Behind the Sherman Anti-Trust Law,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 21, No. 5, 1912, pp.
341–371. See especially p. 348.
Wiliam Howard Taft, The Anti-Trust Act and the Supreme Court (New York and London: Harper & Brothers,
1914), p. 4.
Robert Bork, The Antitrust Paradox:A Policy at War With Itself, (Bork Publishing: 1978, 2021), p. 109.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, “Institutions as Fundamental Causes of Long-Run
Growth,” Handbook of Economic Growth, Vol. 1A, No. 385-472 2005, Chapter 6, pp. 386–419.
Milton Friedman references his own words in his essay “A Friedman Doctrine—The Social Responsibilityof Business Is to Increase Profits,” The New York Times, September 13, 1970, https://www.nytimes.
com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html%20
Capitalism%20and%20Freedom (accessed March 9, 2023).
Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Rescinds 2015 Policy that Limited Its Enforcement Ability Under the FTC Act,”
July 1, 2021, https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/07/ftc-rescinds-2015-policy-limitedits-enforcement-ability-under-ftc-act (accessed March 9, 2023).
295 U.S. 602 (1935).
While not directly relevant to the constitutionality of the FTC, the Court’s grant of certiorari in Cmty. Fin. Servs.
Ass'n of Am., Ltd. v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, 51 F.4th 616 (5th Cir. 2022), cert. granted sub nom. CFPB v.
Com. Fin. Servs. Assn., No. 22-448, 2023 WL 2227658 (U.S. Feb. 27, 2023), could signal a major retreat from
Humphrey’s Executor.
U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Oversight of Federal Enforcement of the Antitrust Laws, September
20, 2022, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/committee-activity/hearings/oversight-of-federal-enforcement-ofthe-antitrust-laws (accessed March 9, 2023).
Milton Friedman, “A Friedman Doctrine.”
Joan Luby and Sarah Kurtz, “Increasing Suicide Rates in Early Adolescent Girls in the United States and theEqualization of Sex Disparity in Suicide: The Need to Investigate the Role of Social Media,” JAMA Network
Open, Vol. 2, No. 5 (2019) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abstract/2733419 (lastvisited March 21, 2023); Brett Burstein, “Suicidal Attempts and Ideation Among Children and Adolescents in US
Emergency Departments, 2007–2015.” JAMA Pediatrics, Vol. 173, No. 6 (2019), pp. 598–600, https://jamanetwork.
com/journals/jamapediatrics/articlepdf/2730063/jamapediatrics_burstein_2019_ld_190006.pdf (last visited
March 21, 2023); Katherine M. Keyes, Dahsan Gary, et al., “Recent Increases in Depressive Symptoms Among U.S.
Adolescents: Trends from 1991 to 2018,” Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Vol. 54, No. 8 (2019), pp.
987–99, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-019-01697-8 (last visited March 21, 2023); Ramin Mojtabai,Mark Olfson, and Beth Han, “National Trends in the Prevalence and Treatment of Depression in Adolescents andYoung Adults,” Pediatrics, Vol. 138, No. 6 (2014), https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/138/6/
e20161878/52639/National-Trends-in-the-Prevalence-and-Treatment-of (last visited March 21, 2023); Gregory
Plemmons, Matthew Hall, et. al., Hospitalization for Suicide Ideation or Attempt: 2008–2015,” Pediatrics, Vol. 141,
No. 6 (2018), https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/141/6/e20172426/37690/Hospitalization-for-SuicideIdeation-or-Attempt (last visited March 21, 2023); Henry A. Spiller, John P. Ackerman, et al., “Sex- and Age-Specific
Increases in Suicide Attempts by Self-poisoning in the United States Among Youth and Young Adults from 2000
to 2018,” Journal of Pediatrics, Vol. 210, (2019), pp. 201–208, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/
pii/S002234761930277X?casa_token=jms1NxTEV10AAAAA:Ouz_vL9ElIZ58p21w_5SuwOs0OJTNJZtCakf5O3I_
NJCcXWoBm0zDvDTvm-YB0Ma5pZhiKXN (last visited March 21, 2023); Jean M. Twenge, A. Bell Cooper, Thomas
E. Joiner, et al., “Age, Period, and Cohort Trends in Mood Disorder Indicators and Suicide-related Outcomes in a
Nationally Representative Dataset, 2005–2017,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Vol. 128 (2019), pp. 185–199,
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fabn0000410 (last visited March 21, 2023).

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2025 Presidential Transition Project
17. Jean M. Twenge, Jonathan Haidt, Andrew B. Blake, Cooper McAllister, Hannah Lemon, and Astrid Le Roy,
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