The FTC's Renewed Fight Against Corporate Power (with Elizabeth Wilkins)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2024

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After decades of slow and cautious movement, the Federal Trade Commission has suddenly kicked into overdrive. You’ve likely seen headlines about the FTC challenging corporate mergers and monopolies, loosening Big Tech’s chokehold on our digital lives, and fighting power imbalances that favor big corporations over American consumers. Elizabeth Wilkins, former Chief of Staff and Director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the FTC, joins Nick and Goldy to give a status update on the FTC's renewed focus on competition and broader antitrust enforcement, and to explain how the historical evolution of the agency has led to a lack of regulation and oversight in maintaining fair competition and consumer protection. Elizabeth Wilkins is an expert in consumer protection and competition policy and a newly minted Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. Previously, she was the Chief of Staff to the Chair and Director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the Federal Trade Commission. Before joining the FTC, Wilkins served as Senior Advisor to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. Twitter: @ewwilkins Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
0:10.0	It's time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down.
0:15.0	Middle out economics is the answer.
0:18.0	Because Wall Street didn't build this country.
0:20.0	Great middle class built this country.
0:22.0	The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy from the middle out.
0:42.0	Welcome to the show.
0:44.0	One of the most reprehensible things about
0:50.0	one of the most reprehensible things about neoliberalism, Nick, and really Orthodox
0:56.7	Neoclassical economics in general, is the way that economic theory just wishes away the notion of power in the economy.
1:09.0	The idea that, oh, markets are perfectly efficient, and so nobody can have outsized power because the market
1:17.6	will even everything out in the end.
1:21.2	Couldn't be more true and...
1:23.0	Well, it couldn't be more false.
1:25.0	Yeah, no, no, no, that's true.
1:27.0	I know what you meant there.
1:29.0	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, power is everywhere. Yeah, and you know an economic theory that doesn't include power would be like a physics that doesn't include gravity. You know it's so obviously a really important thing that
1:47.2	it's just shocking how it went away and you know I think one of the worst things that happened to the economy over the last 50 years,
1:56.0	you know, was very centered in this idea that power doesn't exist, because if power doesn't exist,
2:01.0	then none of the regulatory agencies that used to maintain reasonable
2:06.8	balances of power in markets, you know, effectively we're left to shrivel up and die.
2:13.4	Right and that let's be clear that is the whole purpose of regulation
	...

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