by Bob Barr | Mar 17, 2026 | Uncategorized |
Washington ExaminerFar-left Democrats are trying to mask their partisan outrage after Warner Bros.-Discovery (WBD) rejected Netflix’s acquisition bid and accepted an offer from Paramount, a media company owned by Trump ally David Ellison.Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and a dozen House Democrats recently signed a letter to the Treasury and Justice Departments to express their “substantial concerns” that the deal violates antitrust law. According to excerpts from the letter published by Semafor, the lawmakers worry the deal would produce “significant horizontal and vertical overlap in theatrical distribution, premium streaming, and first-window licensing markets, and would likely reduce competition among studios for movies.”These “concerns” are fake. If Warren and Blumenthal were so worried about the anticompetitive effects of market concentration, they would have spent the last few months, when Netflix was the top contender to buy WBD, raising similar objections. In fact, they should have been raising them even more loudly. Antitrust experts largely agree that Paramount’s bid was far less legally problematic than Netflix’s. Netflix is already the country’s largest streaming service with a market share of around 20%. Letting the company acquire WBD’s HBO Max would boost that share to roughly 35%, well above the threshold at which courts consider mergers presumptively illegal.The combined streaming share of HBO Max and Paramount+, on the other hand, is around 22%. By creating a strong new competitor for Netflix, this deal will “stabilize streaming prices, increase competition, and drive new investments in infrastructure, programming, customer convenience, and [user experience] design,” one analysis found.And yet, this cabal of Democrats has consistently attacked Paramount while almost entirely ignoring Netflix.Warren and Blumenthal made their real motives...
by Bob Barr | Mar 16, 2026 | Townhall Article, Uncategorized |
TownhallEvery night we spend on this earth is a gift from God. But some nights are more special than others. Among the more special nights in my life are those spent in the company of Dave Keene, a friend and colleague of many years.Dave and I would visit, of course, during meetings of the NRA Board of Directors, where we both served for several years; those days were capped off usually by a good dinner, a cigar, and a bit of bourbon. They were the high points of whatever events had brought us together.But nights (and days) spent with Dave at his cabin on the banks of a tributary of the Missouri River (I think) were the truly special times.Dave was an avid and expert fly fisherman, and his cabin in Montana was the perfect venue from which he would enjoy this avocation. I was anything but an expert fly fisherman; most probably the worst Dave had ever tried to instruct. Whenever we headed out in his flatboat, usually in the early morning but sometimes late afternoon, Dave would patiently instruct me on the mechanics of fly fishing. He then would spend the next several hours tying replacement flies on my fishing line, as I would invariably lose the last one in the tree branches on the riverbank. No matter. The hours lazily drifting down the river provided the perfect opportunity for me to pepper Dave with questions about everything from current political goings on, to his work at the epicenter of the birth of the modern conservative movement in the 1960s (Dave was but a few years older than...
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...
