Biden quietly reverses decades of antitrust policy A schoolteacher friend from the Boston area once dismisssed the “Taxachusetts” smear. She liked the services Massachusetts provided for her and her child. She did not mind paying for them. Imagine that. Franklin Foer examines the fetish — for fetish it is — behind making efficiency the highest good in setting business policy and practice. There is more to life than low, low prices. Not that federal policy since the Reagan era recognizes that. Or the Chicago school of economics. The Joe Biden administration has been quietly resetting federal policy on mergers, on antitrust and economic concentration. Since the Reagan administration stopped enforcing antitrust laws, Foer explains, “the American economy has grown dangerously concentrated, dominated by a shrinking number of airlines, banks, tech companies, and pharmaceutical firms (to name just a few examples). Corporate titans have amassed outsize influence over the political process, smothered start-ups, and often treated consumers with shocking indifference.” Readers don’t need this explained to them. They’ve lived it. Foer goes on (The Atlantic): Why did the Reaganites do this? They were in thrall to the idea that the highest, in fact the only, valid goal of economic policy is efficiency—defined narrowly as the maximum output for the lowest prices. And they believed that Big Business was inherently efficient. They were devastatingly successful at entrenching that view. For two generations, their version of efficiency became the driving logic of competition policy (and other areas, including trade), regardless of the party in…