This administration was at least partially elected in hopes it would reverse the years of inflation and bring back the economic growth and low taxes from Trump’s first term. Now, with J.D. Vance joining the ticket, conservatives are poised to take a new approach—one that views markets not as sacred but as tools to strengthen American workers and families.
But tools are only as effective as the job they’re meant to do. And if policymakers misdiagnose the problem, they’ll use the wrong tools—hurting the very people they claim to protect.
J.D. Vance rose to fame chronicling the collapse of working-class life in Hillbilly Elegy. Vance shocked many conservatives by supporting Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, a progressive poster child known for her crusade against corporate consolidation. But Khan’s antitrust strategy has proven to be a blunt instrument, ignoring market realities in favor of outdated ideals.
The FTC under Khan has pursued a vision marked by a focus on structure—as shown in the revamped merger guidelines—and of competition rooted in an academic fantasy of perfect competition. Under this model, consumers enjoy endless choices, firms experience minimal barriers to entry, goods are interchangeable, and information is flawless. But as Duke professor Michael Munger has pointed out, perfect competition doesn’t exist outside a textbook.
Regardless, the pursuit of such an ideal can be seen through Kahn’s emphasis on democratizing the market through multiple participants and the idea that multiple participants rather than outcomes are the ultimate goal of competition. What actually exists is imperfect markets with high fixed costs and real tradeoffs.
However, as Munger, and reality have demonstrated, antitrust doesn’t operate in markets with perfect competition. The challenge is to guide enforcement in a way that protects competition in imperfect markets and with imperfect information.
The real-world consequences of idealism are starting to hit. After Kroger’s proposed merger with Albertsons failed, Kroger announced it would close 60 stores over the next 18 months. The FTC’s original complaint listed more than 100 local markets where it feared a loss of competition. To address these concerns, Krogers/Albertsons agree to sell stores and commit to honoring existing agreements with unions.
Of the stores currently announced, none were included in the FTC’s initial scope. One possibility is that the FTC protected vulnerable areas. Another more likely explanation is that its analysis failed to account for the changing economics of retail, where scale is often necessary to compete against online giants and inflationary pressure. Blocking the merger may have preserved theoretical competitors—but at the expense of real jobs and affordable groceries.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) made a similar mistake when is successfully stopped a proposed merger between Spirit and JetBlue Airlines. In the complaint, the department argued that consumers benefited from the Spirit effect, which is when airlines lower prices to better compete with low-cost options such as Spirit.
But by trying to preserve low prices, the DOJ ignored the reality that Spirit hadn’t turned a profit in five years, and JetBlue was hemorrhaging cash. The merger wasn’t about greed—it was about survival in a brutal, high-cost industry. In industries with high fixed costs, scale is essential to be profitable, as shown by the dominance of the Big Four airlines, which are Delta, American, Southwest, and United.
Without the merger, JetBlue cut service to five cities and reduced flights to other destinations. Spirit furloughed 260 pilots, but most notably, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Now, it’s trying to reposition itself as a higher-end airline with higher ticket prices—exactly what the DOJ claimed to fear from the merger. If the goal was protecting low-cost travel, this outcome would be a self-inflicted wound.
Spirit aims to increase revenues by 13 percent per seat. Granted, this is still not as much of an increase as the DOJ expected to occur following a merger with JetBlue—the complaint estimated a 24 percent increase—but combined with reduced access due to route restrictions, the economic realities of running an airline should have received more attention.
The trend doesn’t stop there.
When Amazon walked away from its acquisition of iRobot, the FTC and EU patted themselves on the back for stopping “self-preferencing” in the robotic vacuum space. But Amazon never got the chance to engage in such behavior—and iRobot is now floundering, laying off staff, and struggling to stay afloat. Even under the impossible ideal of perfect competition, the elimination of a competitor should not be considered a success.
The unifying problem is that antitrust regulators are building their cases on faulty counterfactuals—the idea that if the merger hadn’t happened, everything would have stayed the same or gotten better. But the status quo is rarely stable. Companies fail. Industries consolidate. Inflation hits. Competition is dynamic, not static. Vance and other members of the “new right” may believe markets should serve workers and families. But if the result of this antitrust zeal is bankrupt airlines, shuttered stores, and disappearing innovators, that vision is failing. Counterfactual analysis should be grounded in economic reality—not progressive nostalgia for a market that never existed.
Tirzah Duren is the President of the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.