Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell famously declared: “Watch what we do, not what we say.” When that was done to him, he wound up in prison. A similar lesson applies to understanding the courts. Academics can debate whether cartels can contribute positively to consumer welfare under some (unlikely) circumstances. Indeed, Penn law professor Herbert Hovenkamp... Read More
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, freshly appointed by President Trump, made what seemed to be a stunning announcement. On X, he posted that the FTC and DOJ would continue to use the 2023 Merger Guidelines, as conceived by his predecessor, Lina Khan. This appeared to be a stunning victory for New Brandeisians, one that upset the... Read More
Imagine two business partners, Sue and Steve, form a company. The company finds success and is acquired by a larger competitor. After the sale has been consummated but before the payment has arrived, Sue seeks to dissolve the partnership, asserting that Steve does not deserve any of the proceeds from the sale. While the fair... Read More
Back in 2011, ESPN and the NCAA agreed to a $34 million per year media deal that gave ESPN the right to broadcast championships in 29 different college sports. The list of sports included every single college sport played by women. As time went by, it became increasingly clear this media deal dramatically undervalued the... Read More
The shooting of its CEO has flung UnitedHealth Group (“UHG”) into the American zeitgeist, and there’s been no shortage of heated opinions on what to make of it. With the tragedy nearly two months behind us, perhaps we can now reflect, dispassionately, on the real diagnosis here: UHG has been monopolizing and “monopsonizing” American health... Read More
Skiers are an admittedly unsympathetic crowd. At least the jetsetters who fly around the country chasing the toniest resorts like Park City. Local skiers, on the other, might not earn the same incomes as the jetsetters, but nevertheless must pay the same, lofty lift prices. Setting aside the welfare of locals, one can partly understand... Read More
The election results present a puzzle of sorts. On the one hand, voters expressed deep resentment towards inflation, under the belief that Biden contributed to rising prices, failed to address them, or both. On the other hand, Trump’s signature economic policy is tariffs—on imports from Mexico to Canada and now Israel—which most economists believe will... Read More
Haters sometimes accuse the Federal Reserve of being a shadowy cabal of private bankers that slipped loose from democratic oversight. But we at The Sling trust our patriotic central bankers, who have never had anything to hide. To help the Fed tell its side of the story, we submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)... Read More
Many Americans are still in shock because our worst fears just came true: European regulators fined an American Big Tech firm a whopping one half of one percent of its annual revenue for violating some kind of “law.” To add insult to injury, radical American enforcers slipped loose from the adult supervision of the defense... Read More
