Biden Says Fighting Inflation Is His Top Economic Priority. His Antitrust Policy Would Make Inflation Worse.

To hear President Joe Biden tell it, “tackling inflation” is his “top economic priority.” In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Biden outlined a three-point plan to “ transition from rapid recovery to stable, steady growth” by “[bringing] inflation down.” 

Yet as Reason‘s Eric Boehm noted, Biden’s own policies, particularly the $2 trillion partisan spending bill Biden and congressional Democrats pushed through at the start of Biden’s presidency, contributed to the current inflationary environment, pumping massive stimulus into the economy in an explicit bid to run the economy “hot”—despite clear warnings, even from left-leaning economists aligned with the Democratic Party, that doing so would produce harmful levels of inflation.

Indeed, even as Biden promises to whip inflation now, his administration is continuing to pursue policies more likely than not to make inflation worse despite cautions from within the Democratic establishment. In particular, his administration is pressing forward with aggressive antitrust enforcement against large companies like Amazon that would drive upward pressure on prices. 

On the same day that Biden’s inflation op-ed appeared, Bloomberg News reported that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had renewed an antitrust investigation into Amazon, focusing specifically on the company’s acquisition of movie producer MGM Studios. That investigation is proceeding under an FTC led by Lina Khan, a Biden appointee who in a 2017 paper for the Yale Law Journal made a case for expanded antitrust action against the online retailer, arguing that the standard approach was deficient. Bloomberg News reports that Khan “has taken a personal interest in the probe.”  

Biden has encouraged Khan’s zeal, and his advisers have argued in the past that more aggressive antitrust policy against large corporations can be a tool for fighting inflation. But it’s hard to see this as much more than a political crutch for a flailing administration: When the price of gas began to go up, Biden urged the FTC to pursue investigations of supposedly anticompetitive oil and gas companies. When the price of beef rose, Biden urged antitrust probes into the meatpacking industry. 

In December, Biden advisers admitted to The N