Passage A
The recent push to expand antitrust enforcement beyond the 'consumer welfare' standard fundamentally misapprehends the institutional limits of the judiciary. Proponents of the structuralist approach argue that antitrust laws should be wielded to break up monopolies in order to disperse political power and protect democratic institutions. While it is undeniable that massive corporate conglomerates exert substantial political influence, the judiciary is not the appropriate vehicle for redressing such imbalances. Judges are equipped to evaluate quantifiable metrics, such as output restrictions and price increases. When courts are instead asked to determine how much market share constitutes an unacceptable threat to democracy, they are left without objective legal standards, inevitably transforming antitrust enforcement into an exercise in arbitrary, subjective policymaking.
Passage B
For nearly a century, the primary objective of antitrust law was the preservation of a decentralized economy, operating on the understanding that concentrated market power inherently translates into dangerous political leverage. The modern reduction of antitrust jurisprudence to the 'consumer welfare' standard—which focuses exclusively on short-term price effects—is a historical aberration. Defenders of this narrow approach often claim that evaluating the political consequences of corporate consolidation requires sociological judgments that courts are incapable of making. Yet this ahistorical defense ignores the reality that, prior to the 1970s, courts routinely and successfully applied structuralist antitrust principles. Evaluating market dominance and its threat to democratic competition requires no more subjective guesswork than is demanded by the highly malleable econometric models currently used to predict consumer pricing.
Statement: The authors of Passage A and Passage B are committed to disagreeing over whether large corporate conglomerates possess the ability to exert influence over political systems.
Answer: Answer