An Anti-Monopoly Approach for the Green New Deal

In the days since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced their “Green New Deal” to restructure theU.S. economy to fight climate change and eliminate inequality, their vision has been widely derided by Republicans and even some Democrats as “command and control” socialism. Others, however, have welcomed the boldness of the idea, which calls for a complete mobilization of society to restructure energy, transportation, and agriculture, and just about every other corner of the political economy.

As conservative columnist Ross Douthat put it in The New York Times, there “are virtues in trying to offer not just a technical blueprint but a comprehensive vision of the good society, and virtues as well in insisting that dramatic change is still possible in America, that grand projects and scientific breakthroughs are still within our reach.”

There are also virtues in having a practical way to achieve these goals, and the Green New Deal may actually be closer to having such a plan than most people – including some of its authors – appear to understand.The key lies in the second-to-last provision of the bill, which calls for “ensuring a commercial environment where every business person is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies.”

As Open Markets makes clear through our whole body of work, many if not most of the gravest ills in our society today are caused or made worse by monopolization. Inequality, after all, is largely a function of monopolists driving up prices and driving down wages. Our health care crisis is made worse by monopolistic hospitals and drug companies. Corporate concentration leads to the destruction of family farms, independent, locally-owned businesses, and to the decline of civic capital and self-governance in communities across our nation.

Sure enough monopoly power is also at the heart of our climate change problem. With the adoption of more regenerative, organic farming practices, for example, today’s industrial agriculture could go from being a major source of pollution to a major means of sequestering carbon and achieving other environmental benefits. Yet anyone who wants to reform today’s industrial food system must deal with the power of agribusiness giants like chemical maker Bayer-Monsanto and slaughterhouse monopolist JBS, as well as with food retail and processing behemoths like Walmart and Kraft Heinz, who all have a deep interest in maintaining the status quo.

Similarly, a cleaner energy system means tackling giant electricity corporations like Exelon, which use their control of transmission lines not only to suppress renewable energy technologies but to protect old and dirty nuclear plants. It means breaking up the power of hydrocarbon giants like Koch Industries. And it means taking on corporations that outsource to China and other countries as a mean of avoiding environmental regulation.

Again, do you want to improve the efficiency of airliners? That means addressing how the Airbus-Boeing duopoly has reduced incentives to improve efficiency. Do you want to build more transit and high-speed rail, or make greater use of photovoltaics? That means standing up to theChinese state’s efforts to monopolize manufacturing in both of these realms.

Nationalization is not an answer to any of these challenges. Under Communism, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union promoted dirty heavy industries, and today, China’s state-owned enterprises are among the worst polluters on the planet. Nationalization only raises the question of how the American people would then structure competition within each particular industry to drive both real efficiency and technological innovation.

A just and sustainable future? The way forward is not to put the state in charge, nor to “let the market work.” It is to use the state to engineer competitive markets in every sector of our economy.