While driving around yesterday I heard the presumed Presidential Whiz-kid on the radio saying how important competition is. His carefully prepared remarks were made prior to signing an executive order targeting “anticompetitive” practices in tech, health care and other parts of the economy. Emphasis on other parts of the economy whereas that is anything we say it it.
The sweeping order includes 72 actions and recommendations that Biden said would lower prices for families, increase wages for workers and promote innovation and faster economic growth.
Ha! That’s a good one – let’s give agencies and bureaucrats even more power to create regulations to dictate how we live and breathe. None of which will do a thing to improve competition, certainly not the kind that would actually allow us to compete in the dangerous arena of ideas.
For example, I daresay none of the 72 actions will do anything to make Twitter stop shadow banning and suspending accounts of people they don’t like. Will any of them make Facebook stop censoring posts they don’t approve of? Or get YouTube to stop demonetizing and/or shutting down conservative channels? Or require search engines to show results from non-approved websites such as oh, I don’t know – Breitbart, PJMedia, Conservative Tree House, Washington Examiner etc. etc. – without having to enter the name of the website? No, to all of the above. Do you not know how the state-run propaganda media platform works?
And what about China? Will Joey do anything to make his CCP overlords compete on a level playing field? Again, no.
So lets stop pretending. Joey’s really big competition effort may do some helpful things such as require airlines to refund baggage fees when bags are delayed, but it will do absolutely nothing about establishing a basis for actual competition. In that way it’s just like the Infrastructure Bill, in which everything from childcare to diversity training is considered infrastructure; everything is “competition” except actual competition.
But that’s okay, we’ll just keep pretending we’re still trying to be world competitors.
And Joey can keep pretending to be president. What could go wrong?
No, everything’s fine, I’m just relaxing and hanging out.
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