The ideological certainty with which FTC Commissioner Lina Khan explains her latest investigation into Microsoft is indicative of the zeitgeist of our times. Interviewed by the Wall Street Journalshe explains that Microsoft may have violated antitrust law – or rather policy and politics, because it’s not really a law–by consensually hiring the co-founder of the startup Inflection AI and almost all of his staff, and offsetting the ongoing concern with licensing fees. Watch the video accompanying the story «FTC opens antitrust investigation into Microsoft AI deal», June 6, 2024. It is with the most reasonable political correctness that Ms. Khan declares:
There is a growing recognition in Washington that as a government we cannot simply sit back and do nothing.
I wonder at what fleeting moment Joe Biden’s young law professor appointee thinks the federal government has been “totally indifferent” and “aloof.” It would be interesting to know what evidence she has to support her claim.
She also says:
You’re right, in some ways it’s going to be different. …And we, as policymakers and as a society, can help make decisions and choices that will steer technologies onto a path that actually serves us rather than a model in which a handful of companies extract more and more of society, of creators. , and people feel like they have no recourse.
Who are “we as policy makers” and “we as a society”? Are both “we” politics the same? Isn’t “we as policy makers” at best 50% +1 of “we as a society”? And that’s the best case scenario. I suspect that our political bureaucrat in Washington has not thought much about these questions and maintains an intuitive and naive conception of democracy. Twentieth-century welfare economics and social choice theory, often developed by economists who, like Ms. Khan, had a weakness for economic and social planning, showed that “we, as a society”, We raise problems of aggregation of preferences which can only be resolved through authoritarianism – “dictatorship”, in the terms of Kenneth Arrow’s famous theorem. Only a society of identical individuals can be imagined saying “we” (through our collective mouths). James Buchanan and the economics of public choice added a realistic view of “us as policy makers” and a a more sensible vision of democracy.
In reality, Ms. Khan’s “we as policymakers” hides an authoritarian desire to control society:
At the FTC…we look at the entire stack, from chip to cloud to models to applications. …The raw material for many of these tools is in the hands of a very small number of companies. … There could be self-dealing, there could be discrimination, there could be exclusion, so that the big players get bigger at the expense of everyone else.
Ms. Khan seems to unknowingly admit that her crusade is part of a general ideology of social engineering from above.
Could it be that Microsoft and Inflection have structured their deal so that it doesn’t fall foul of what the Surveillance State doesn’t like? It’s certainly a possibility. It’s a scary possibility, but not in the way Khan seems to imagine. THE rule of law is not a majority government using a vast and growing body of laws and regulations to prevent anything that “we as policy makers” don’t like and imposing anything that “we as policy makers” policies”, we want. Such a conception of government represents a “government of men” (OK, say “of people”), not a “government of laws.” With the proliferation of laws and regulations, there must now be at least one legal instrument for every potential power grab. Refusing to see this suggests a disregard for both the economic-scientific study of society and the modern conception of freedom, in favor of a reckless and dangerous predilection for collective over individual choices.
As an instinctive adherent to majoritarian democracy…us, as policy makers representative we, as the current majority of society-MS. Khan should be as happy if Donald Trump is elected decision-maker in chief as if the crown were given to Joe Biden. The people will have spoken in either case. Posing the problem in these terms suggests that the danger of collective choices is the same on the right and the left as we know them: under a strong leader, “we” impose “our” preferences on the rest of “us”. It is urgent to move beyond the political framework.
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Big Mother takes control of bad companies (By DALL-E under the inspiration of P. Lemieux)
