Here’s a revealing Wall Street Journal headline yesterday:

No kidding.

It only took the courts and the lawyers 100 years to realize that markets move almost infinitely faster than the government.  Antitrust rules are the legal system’s version of Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Roadrunner.

In the case of Google, this is a company whose search engine has created trillions of dollars of consumer surplus – an estimated $17,000 per user per year.

We have an idea. Repeal the Sherman Antitrust Act – which we would argue has been the most harmful regulatory contraption of all time.

In virtually every case the government regulators have brought – starting with the infamous case breaking up Standard Oil, through high-profit suits against AT&T, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple – these supposed monopolists weren’t gouging consumers, they were rapidly lowering prices and expanding affordability.

Believe it or not, there was even a case not long ago accusing Intel of being a monopoly.  Amazing. One day the politicians accuse Intel of making too much money, and the next thing you know the “monopoly” is losing so much money they need a taxpayer bailout.

In a free market, profits are GOOD and the bad actors of the economy are not the companies that have “excessive” profits, but the ones that have excessive losses.