by Bob Barr | Feb 16, 2026 | Uncategorized |
Daily CallerThe one remarkably consistent concern on the minds of American consumers can be summed up in one word: prices. It is even driving congressional debates this year, as lawmakers face mounting pressure to show that they understand what constituents’ families face every time they swipe a card at the checkout counter.One of the least discussed aspects of this multi-faceted, supply-and-demand problem — more than charges of “corporate greed” — is regulation. Most specifically, anger at the Biden administration’s policies that targeted the very market efficiencies that tend to keep prices down.Perhaps nowhere was this phenomenon more evident than in former President Joe Biden’s antitrust policy.Under the previous administration, federal regulators increasingly treated scale and efficiency not as consumer benefits (which they are), but as suspect behavior requiring government intervention. Thus, discounts realized from buying in bulk were reframed as “unfair.” The result of this mindset was an antitrust agenda that, if fully realized, would have pushed everyday costs even higher.For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations shared a basic antitrust principle: enforcement should protect competition, not individual competitors. The metric was simple — do consumers benefit through lower prices, greater choice, and innovation? This consumer-focused barometer helped keep antitrust focused on real harms rather than political preferences.That consensus fractured under Biden’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Led by its uber-liberal Chair, Lina Khan, the agency revived a long-dormant New Deal statute, the “Robinson-Patman Act,” and weaponized it to attack routine volume discounts.The law, written in the 1930s, was dusted off not to stop collusion or monopoly pricing (which was its original purpose), but to challenge price differences that often reflect ordinary cost savings. This marked a significant expansion...
by Bob Barr | May 9, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerPresident Trump is right to make lowering drug prices one of his priorities. American consumers are sick of paying two, three, even five times more for medications than the prices outside our borders. A proposal the Administration is considering, however, threatens to make the problem much worse. It is true that the United States is in effect subsidizing the rest of the world’s drug costs. Since countries like Canada and France, with economies that are overtly socialist, impose strict government price caps on drugmakers, pharmaceutical companies charge Americans more to make up the difference – a situation that is neither fair nor free-market.So, when the Trump Administration reportedly began soliciting proposals to implement a so-called “Most Favored Nation” (“MFN”) policy for pharmaceuticals, it understandably attracted attention. On the surface, the move to a pharmaceutical most-favored-nation strategy sounds like a tough, Trumpian fix. In reality, it represents the same, discredited and dangerous idea the Left has been pushing for years, just repackaged in MAGA talking points.The positive, and practical solution to this inequitable treatment – one that actually is quintessential Trump — is to stop subsidizing drugmakers who treat American consumers like suckers and view our vast pharmaceutical market as a bottomless piggy bank. The problem is, no Big Pharma company wants to give up the substantial federal research dollars, tax credits, and government contracts now provided by Uncle Sam. The one action that would cause Big Pharma to stand up and take notice would be for the Trump Administration to seriously threaten to cut off that largess unless Big Pharma starts treating American consumers as fairly as it treats foreign governments. This actually could start to solve the problem...
by Bob Barr | Mar 27, 2025 | Uncategorized |
They’re Lying To You About The...
by Bob Barr | Mar 19, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerPresident Donald Trump’s planned executive order to bolster U.S. shipbuilding acknowledges a hard truth: China is winning the global economic battle, at least in the maritime sector. The U.S. defeated Japan in the Pacific theater of World War Two in large part because we could pump out new ships faster than the Japanese could sink them. America even flaunted its superior industrial base by launching vessels that served no purpose beyond boosting morale — most famously a floating ice cream factory. Today, however, our primary global adversary, China, has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, giving Beijing a significant advantage in any naval war of attrition. While the fact sheet accompanying Trump’s E.O. accurately notes that China achieved its “position of dominance in the global market through unfair non-market practices,” this isn’t a simple case of socialism versus capitalism. Unfair or not, it is a very real and serious problem we must acknowledge and confront.Ironically, American companies have a much harder time building anything than their counterparts in communist China. Not only do American shipyards face much stricter environmental reviews than many foreign competitors, but they also face the one-two punch of expansive regulations and organized labor. Instead of addressing workplace health and safety concerns through our legal tort system or through collective bargaining with workers, shipbuilding companies (and manufacturers of all stripes) are forced to spend billions — and years — complying with invasive government rules. These in turn create an elevated “floor” that serves as the new starting point for each future labor negotiation.Neither side in this geo-political contest is abiding by free-market principles. The difference is that while China stimulated its shipbuilding industry with state...
by Bob Barr | Mar 6, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn his first few weeks in office, President Donald Trump has been busy bolstering the causes of energy choice and freedom for citizens of the United States. One of his first official acts was to pull us out of the Paris Climate Accord, the one-sided agreement that had imposed harsh and unfair restrictions on the United States. Trump created a new National Energy Council led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, charged with streamlining energy permitting, expanding gas and oil exploration, and establishing American global “energy dominance.” Then, to round off his first day as our 47th President, he signed an executive order aimed at eliminating Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate” — shorthand for a series of subsidies and regulations aimed at artificially boosting demand for EVs. Some of these measures, such as rolling back the EV tax credit, will at some point require congressional action. Moreover, even with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, those who disagree with energy choice and Trump’s energy freedom movements still have plenty of options at their disposal to push their “green” agenda forward. One side-door tactic would be to use “blue state” legislatures to advance policies that would stand little if any chance of passing congressional muster. Vermont and New York already have passed “climate superfund” legislation, and similar bills are pending in other states. Putting a price tag on a particular company’s contribution to the damage supposedly caused by climate change is a murky endeavor at best, and fraudulent at worst. As climate policy analyst Paul Driessen notes, climate activists are all too happy to “blame fossil fuels for heat waves, cold spells, hurricanes, wildfires (including those caused by arsonists, electric companies and forest mismanagement), floods,...
