We’re mystified and worried by conservatives who are suddenly charmed by FTC chair Lina Khan. Here’s the WSJ rap sheet on this weird loveseat:
Since being appointed by President Biden three years ago, the 35-year-old Khan has turned the obscure federal agency into a high-profile battleship aimed at the big corporations she says have distorted markets and harmed consumers. Her aggressive actions against Big Tech and other industries have inflamed the business community, and not all have been successful. But in an anomaly in this partisan age, a group of conservatives has cheered her efforts, seeing her as a fellow traveler in the populist cause.
The “Khanservatives,” as they call themselves, tend to be younger and Trumpier, part of the growing ranks of Republicans who question unfettered markets and see big corporations as an adversary to their constituents.
“As the Republican Party becomes more working class, we’re less captive to the neolibertarian view that everything big business does to people is OK,” said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz…His party, he said, “can’t be whores for big business and be the voice of the working class at the same time.”
Why would any free-market conservatives be aiding and abetting a Marxist member of the Clinton regulatory army and her radical trustbusting strategy that empowers politicians and lawyers to stop American firms from becoming too big and too profitable?
(Call us hopelessly naive, but isn’t that the goal of starting a business?)
Khan is trying to break up successful firms, even when they are REDUCING prices to consumers. Talk about a victimless “crime.”
We wish that Matt Gaetz and others who want to hunt down monopolies would aim their fire at what is by far the most destructive monopoly of all: the public school system.