A quiet belief in authoritarian values.

The ideological convictions with which FTC Commissioner Lina Khan describes her recent investigation into Microsoft reveal the zeitgeist of our time. person interviewed wall street journal, she explains that Microsoft may have violated antitrust laws, or rather policy and politics, by hiring the co-founder of the startup Inflection AI and almost all of its employees on a consensual basis and compensating their ongoing concerns with licensing fees. . Watch the video that accompanies the story.FTC opens antitrust investigation into Microsoft AI deal,” June 6, 2024. It is with the greatest sense of political correctness that Mrs. Khan declares:

There is a growing recognition in Washington that, as a government, we cannot remain completely hands-off and out of the way.

I wonder when a young law professor nominated by Joe Biden thought the federal government was “completely non-interfering” and “obstructing.” It would be interesting to know what evidence she has to support her own claims.

She also says:

You’re right that in some ways this will look different. … And as policymakers and as a society, we can help make decisions and choices that steer technology down a path that actually serves us, rather than a model where a few companies extract more and more from society and its creators. , people feel like they have no one to turn to.

Who are “us as policy makers” and “us as a society”? Are the two political “wes” the same? Don’t “we as policy makers” represent at best 50% +1 of “us as a society”? And that’s the best case. I suspect that the political bureaucracy in Washington has not reflected much on these issues and has an intuitive and naive conception of democracy. Twentieth-century welfare economics and social choice theory, often developed by economists who like economic and social planning like Mr. Kahn, showed that “we as a society” pose a problem of preference sets that can only be solved. By authoritarianism, or to express Kenneth Arrow’s famous theorem, “dictatorship.” Only a society of identical individuals can be imagined as saying “we” (through the mouth of our group). James Buchanan and public choice economics added a realistic view of “us as policy makers” and a more rational view of democracy.

Indeed, Mr. Khan’s “us as policy makers” hides an authoritarian desire to control society.

The FTC is scrutinizing the entire stack, from chips to compute clouds, models and apps. … The raw materials for many of these tools are in the hands of very few companies. … There can be self-dealing, there can be discrimination, there can be exclusion, so big companies get bigger and bigger at the expense of everyone else.

Mr. Khan seems to unconsciously acknowledge that his movement is part of a general ideology of social engineering from above.

Could Microsoft and Inflection have structured their deal to keep the surveillance state from interfering with things it doesn’t like? That’s definitely a possibility. It’s a scary possibility, but not in the way Khan imagines. The rule of law does not consist of majoritarian governments using broad and expanding complex laws and regulations to prevent what “we as policy makers” do not like and to dictate whatever “we as policy makers” want. That conception of government refers not to a “government of laws,” but to a “government of the people” (okay, designate it as a “government of the people”). With the proliferation of laws and regulations, there must now be at least one legal mechanism for every potential power grab. To reject this is to ignore both the economic-scientific study of society and the modern concept of freedom, and to imply an unexamined and dangerous bias that favors collective choice over individual choice.

As someone who instinctively supports majoritarian democracy—We as policy makers representing We are the majority in today’s society—Ms. Khan would be just as happy if Donald Trump were elected policymaker as if the crown were given to Joe Biden. People would say the same thing in one case as in another. Framing the problem in these terms implies that the risks of collective choice are the same for both the right and the left as we know them. Under a strong leader, “we” force “our” preferences on the rest of “us.” It is urgent to think outside the political box.

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