Antitrust, Inequality, Piketty
Nicolas Petit
Professor of Competition Law and Head of Law Department at European University Institute
Proponents of antitrust as a tool against inequality do not seem to properly master their Piketty:
"Many people worry that moving toward greater cooperation and political integration within, say, the European Union only undermines existing achievements (starting with the social states that the various countries of Europe constructed in response to the shocks of the twentieth century) without constructing anything new other than a vast market predicated on ever purer and more perfect competition. Yet pure and perfect competition cannot alter the inequality r > g, which is not the consequence of any market “imperfection.” On the contrary".
Source: T. Piketty, Capital in the XXIst Century, Conclusion
The bottom line: the existence of an economic issue does not mandate the use of antitrust to solve it. Even more so when this economic issue is in fact more of a social demand for increased corporate control than an uncontroversially diagnosed empirical problem. In brief, it is a bad idea, even for Piketty, to reinvent antitrust in order to curb inequality.