Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, has introduced legislation to give the Justice Department the ability to seek wiretaps in antitrust investigations. Why give the DOJ this power? Because we allow it for other crimes, cried DeWine in the Congressional Record:
There are over 150 predicate offenses [for authorizing wiretaps] from title 18 and dozens of other predicate offenses from other parts of the U.S. Criminal Code. Offenses, such as wire fraud, mail fraud, and bank fraud are predicate offenses, but up to now, criminal antitrust offenses have not been on the list. I think this is a mistake. Criminal antitrust offenses are basically white-collar, fraud offenses, and often do much more harm to innocent consumers than other types of fraud offenses.
DeWine’s arguments are patently false. Antitrust cases generally have nothing to do with fraud—they involve government prosecutors criminalizing the rather ordinary exercise of property rights. If competitors meet to discuss how to mutually dispose of (sell) their own property, that is not fraud. The “harm to innocent consumers” that DeWine bemoans is hyperbole used to describe price increases. Anti-cartel cases have become a means for the DOJ to impose soft price controls on industries and extort large sums of money for state purposes; the “injured” consumers rarely share in the government’s antitrust windfalls.
DeWine has contended that, “we have not given the Department of Justice all the tools it needs to investigate and prosecute criminal antitrust conspiracies.” A wiretap is not a “tool”; it is a state assault against individual rights. That aside, DeWine has cited no evidence that the DOJ is suffering for a lack of wiretap power. According to the DOJ’s 2000-2003 statistics, the Antitrust Division only lost four out of 83 criminal cases filed. Would the wiretaps have made the difference in those four losses?
Of course not. DeWine wants to give antitrust investigators more “tools” so that it will be easier to coerce antitrust defendants into waiving due process and pleading guilty. Stacking the deck for prosecutors has been a major priority for legislators since 9/11, and contrary to popular myth, there is little distinction among prosecutors between “terrorism” and other offenses. Consider the current Antitrust Division chief, Hewitt Pate, who has given numerous speeches to foreign audiences post-9/11 denouncing price-fixing as a “supreme evil,” rhetoric that equates American businesses—in the Bush administration’s eyes—with the regimes in Iran and North Korea.
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Regarding political power, didn’t Lord Acton state that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
While they are at it, we should also give the DOJ’s Antitrust Division the power to subpoena information from libraries and airlines. Them evil capitalists are known to search through books at the library and travel via air in their never ending quest to monopolize everything.
– John O.
Someone ought to tell Mike DeWine (as I just now did, here: http://dewine.senate.gov/) that “anti-trust” laws do not prevent monopolies.
On the contrary, they merely establish a “legal” monopolistic cabal, given a high-sounding name like “Securities Exchange Commission” or “Federal Trade Commission,” but really just a protected bunch of racketeers, backed by the guns, jails, and bombs of the monopolistic state, which is granted the power to decide who may “legally” have a monopoly, and who may not.
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