For over 100 years, the antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the consumers' benefit, ensuring there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down while keeping quality up.

Dissatisfaction with big tech and bias against big business generally are leading some policy makers to look at antitrust as a shiny new tool to go after business practices they don't like. Among the current antitrust proposals is throwing out what's called the consumer welfare standard, which makes consumer welfare the primary aim of antitrust enforcement and replacing it with a presumption that bigness itself is bad.

This has been done before and it was the "wild wild west" of antitrust enforcement with courts holding big businesses liable for all sorts of good competitive conduct simply out of fear of bigness. A dissent from 1966 shows why that regime was wrong and why we shouldn't be quick to return to the anti-big business days of hipster antitrust yore.

Anastasia Boden and Elizabeth Slattery are taking on United States v. Von's Grocery in this historical podcast on Dissed.

Thanks to our guests Joshua Wright, Ashley Baker, Yaron Brook, and Hannah Cox.

Special thanks to Judge Douglas Ginsburg for his dramatic reading.

Follow us on Twitter @anastasia_esq @ehslattery @pacificlegal #DissedPod

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