Page 24 - Issue 18

necessary to create and support the markets. A
government does not only step in when markets stumble;
it creates markets and facilitates their development.
Whatever market you look at, everyone engaged in that
market is aware that it functions because it rests upon a
foundation of laws and regulations, with courts and
regulatory authorities to enforce them.

One current example, of course, is the huge regulatory
fight being waged against Facebook. One of the first
questions facing the Biden administration come February
will be what to do about the massive amount of garbage,
hate and incitement being disseminated every minute on
the social media platform, which is a monopoly almost
everywhere in the world. At the same time, the Biden
administration will have to spearhead the effort in
American courts to dismantle the company for violating
the Sherman and Clayton Antirust Acts, passed in the late
19th and early 20th centuries to prevent the formation of
monopolies and their adverse impact.

This is precisely the moment when “free market”
devotees will make a racket and explain the immense good
that Facebook and similar companies have brought the
public and how dangerous it is to “interfere” in the
market. But Facebook, like all the other tech giants, is not
some natural, spontaneous creation that just suddenly
arose out of the jungle where the entrepreneurs live. It is
also largely a product of government – of massive
infrastructure investment, laws regulating property rights,
massive regulation of the capital markets that issued its
stock and, of course, countless basic scientific