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Report identifies key reforms needed to boost health outcomes in Magnolia state

Removing outdated restrictions on health care would boost health care in Mississippi, according to a new report published today.  Mississippi has some of the worst health outcomes in the country, and the full repeal of these anticompetitive laws in the health sector would cut costs and improve access to treatment.

For several decades, an official permit has been required for health care providers wanting to offer new services or expand existing services in 19 key areas of health care.  These permits, known as Certificates of Need (CON), are also required for a provider wanting to spend more than $1.5 million on new medical equipment, relocate services from one part of the state to another, or change ownership.

Unlike other health care licensing laws already in place, the CON process is not designed primarily to assess a provider’s qualifications, safety record, or fitness.  Instead, CON laws require regulators to centrally plan the health care sector by assessing whether each new applicant’s services are “needed” by the community. That question, however, can only be truly answered through the voluntary choices of practitioners and patients.

“If you want to know why Mississippi does not have medical care where it is most needed, CON laws bear much of the blame.  They intentionally take away options for health care,” explained Douglas Carswell, President and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

“What started out a generation ago as a misguided attempt to restrict increases in health costs has become a legally-sanctioned protectionist scheme.  These outdated laws are indefensible and must go.”

CON laws in Mississippi limit the provision of long term care, despite demographic change that has seen the number of elderly people needing care increase dramatically.  Ambulatory services, key diagnostic services, psychiatric services and many other services are all limited by CON laws.

The report, authored by Matthew Mitchell, one of America’s leading experts on health care regulation, references overwhelming evidence which shows that CON laws mean higher spending, less access, and diminished quality of care.

Mitchell’s report identifies a road map for reform, highlighting how full abolition could be achieved.  “The evidence from other states without CON laws not only shows how a Mississippi without CON would enjoy greater access to lower cost and higher quality care, but it also gives us a roadmap for how to do it. In the report, I talk about 11 different strategies for reform,” said Mitchell.

“The Governor and the new Speaker have both committed to improving health outcomes in Mississippi by repealing restrictive practices.  We are excited to see legislation aimed at CON repeal, as well as action by the Board of Health to remove the red tape,” added Carswell.

CON-paper-FINALDownload

Last year, Mississippi Republicans won an overwhelming majority.  Could 2024 be the year when they use that majority to deliver the kind of big, strategic change our state desperately needs? 
 
Here are a number of reforms that Mississippi conservatives have it in their gift to implement, which would transform the long term prospects of our state for the better.

  1. Education Freedom: 

2024 could be the year that we give every family in the state control over their child’s share of education tax dollars, through an Education Freedom Account.  Arkansas passed legislation to do precisely that last year.  Tennessee and Louisiana are poised to do something similar.  Rather than trailing behind, Mississippi lawmakers should take the lead, delivering big, strategic change to improve education in this state, too.   

The Mississippi Center for Public Policy recently held a public rally for education freedom, with Corey DeAngelis and local educators, helping mainstream the idea.  Recent polls now show overwhelming public support.  

Too many families in Mississippi cannot get health coverage.  Rather than hosing federal dollars at the problem, we need to look at what states like Florida are doing to innovate, with alternatives to insurance-based healthcare.  This means ending the restrictive Certificate of Need laws that prevent new low cost health care providers from operating.  It also means allowing nurse practitioners more autonomy.  The Mississippi Center for Public Policy will soon publish a roadmap on how to go about removing CON laws.   

In 2023 Mississippi had a large state budget surplus.  Rather than wait for politicians to think up new ways to spend that surplus, we need to see tax cuts in 2024.  One option would be a further reduction in the state income tax.  

Our neighboring states are reducing the tax burden on families and businesses.  If we want to reverse the population decline in our state, we need to do so too.

In recent months we have seem appalling behaviour by ‘woke’ academics at several leading universities.  It is now clear that DEI is destroying American academia.  So why are public universities in Mississippi still running DEI programs?  The Governor of Oklahoma recently issued an order terminating funding for DEI programs in public universities in that state.  Mississippi needs to stop the rot in public universities and end DEI programs in 2024.

While those are our top four priorities for 2024, here are some other things we would like to see our law makers deliver:

If Mississippi conservatives passed these eight or so laws, they would transform our state for the better.  No longer would we be considered a laggard by some, but as a leader.  

Green energy – folly or the future?

Former White House energy adviser, Mark Mills, addressed at a packed lunch meeting in Jackson, Mississippi, at an event attended by key state policy makers and members of the public.

Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, talked about some of the implications of the rush to renewable energy.  In order to meet net zero carbon dioxide emissions targets, Mark Mills outlined the scale of infrastructure construction that would be required.

“Mark Mills has an encyclopaedic knowledge about energy policy.  He laid out some of the hard facts about what it would take to ditch our dependence on oil and gas.” said Douglas Carswell of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.   

“Mark Mills warned about making the same mistake that Germany has made.  Over there, politicians rushed into renewable energy, and in doing so pushed up the cost of energy.  This has now priced German industry out of the world market” Carswell added.

“If Mississippi wants to keep on attracting more industry, we need to ensure that we continue to have a plentiful supply of affordable energy”. 

“Transitioning to renewables might sound like a bright idea in Washington DC” Carswell added.  “Mark Mills showed that unless the federal government can change the laws of physics it is just not realistic.  America would need to install thousands of new giant wind turbines each week, cover a vast area in solar panels and build dozens of new nuclear plants each year.”

“Politicians might talk glibly about moving to electric vehicles” he added.  “Mark Mills pointed out that we would need hundreds of new charging stations, each one requiring the same amount of electricity as a steel mill.  The capacity and infrastructure simply won’t be there to achieve this rush to renewables”.

The event was hosted jointly by Bigger Pie Forum and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.  Several members of the state legislature and Public Service Commissioners attended and asked questions.

To watch Mark Mills, talk online, click here:

Mark Mills speaking
Mark Mills with Jackson City Councilor Ashby Foote, Nic Lott, and Wayne Carr
Rep. Lee Yancey and Bruce Deer

Job hiring website, Indeed.com, has published data showing the Jackson metro area to be one of the best performing metro areas in America for new job postings.

According to Indeed’s job posting index, the Jackson metro area jobs postings are 54 percent higher now than they were in February 2020.  Of all the metro areas in America, only Phoenix in Arizona and Spokane in Washington performed better than Mississippi’s state capital.

“Indeed’s data on jobs growth shows Jackson Mississippi is outperforming most other American cities when it comes to jobs posting growth since February 2020” explained Douglas Carswell of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

“The Jackson metro area has since that time outperformed cities such as Raleigh, North Carolina and even Dallas, Texas in terms of new jobs postings on Indeed”.

“Clearly this is only one set of data from one job hiring firm, but it is indicative of a broader trend we are now seeing in Mississippi”, Carswell continued. “This state is on the up”.

“Since Governor Tate Reeves signed into law a universal occupational licensing law, and with all that inward investment flowing into the state, the jobs market has picked up.  Mississippi is now part of a wider southern economic success story”.

China is going to become the world’s number one economic superpower, we were told.  And as China takes off economically, they said, she is going to become just like the rest of us.
 
This is what I call the China fallacy, and neither of the assumptions that underpin it are true.

China has indeed had three decades of double-digit growth.  Her take off has been so spectacular, China went from being a largely agrarian economy that accounted for less than 2 percent of world output in 1980 to almost a fifth of output now. 
 
But far from becoming more like us, China under President Xi seems to be becoming not just un-Western, but increasing anti-Western.
 
Twenty years ago, when China was admitted to the World Trade Organisation and President Clinton talked of China as a ‘strategic partner’, all the clever people in Washington said China would move our way. 

By letting China join the international system, the experts said, China would become part of it.  Think of all those tens of millions of middle class Chinese, they assured us.  Soon, like the middle classes in America and Europe, they would be demanding all the trappings of liberal democracy.
 
Two decades later China is busy trying to subvert the international order.  Chinese foreign policy seems to be all about creating rival structures and processes.  Chinese government agents engage in the kind of espionage activities you might expect from a hostile foe. 
 
Those that perpetuated the China fallacy used to tell us that following the British handover of Hong Kong, China would grow to become more like Hong Kong.  Instead, the opposite has happened.  Hong Kong has been brought into line with the rest of China, and what limited freedoms her people had have been taken away. 

Far from taking her place at the international table, China behaves as if she wants to overturn it.  China amasses troops in the western Pacific, bullying Taiwan and making little secret of her plan to invade the island.  This would be the moral equivalent of the United States threatening to annex Vancouver Island.  
 
Rather than becoming more Western, China’s government continually seeks new ways to restrict her citizens from accessing the internet.  Digital technology has been harnessed to monitor the day to day activities of her own people.  The autocrats that preside over China are so thin skinned and morally bankrupt, then actively clamp down on the Falun Gong movement.  This would be the moral equivalent of the US government trying to shut down yoga classes.
 
The assumption that China, under the communist party, is ever going to emulate the West is wrong.  Wrong, too, is the other side of the China fallacy – the assumption that China is destined to be a great superpower.

For as long as I can remember, highbrow magazines have been publishing articles forecasting that China’s economy will overtake America’s.  At one time, we were told this would happen in the 2020s.  Then it was the 2030s.  Now I read it is supposed to happen before 2050.
 
I predict that China’s economy will never overtake America’s.  Only last year, China ceased to be the most populous country on the planet, as India overtook her.  China’s demographic future looks ominous.
 
Today there are 1.4 billion people in China.  By the end of this century, some estimate that China’s population will have fallen about 40 percent to 800 million.

The next few years will see a significant fall in China’s economic growth, I suspect. 
 
It is relatively easy to produce big gains in economic output when you move farm workers into factories (see Soviet Russia in the 1950s for details).  
 
China was able to accelerate economically as a consequence of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.  Deng’s policies were not only market-friendly.  Under Deng, decision-making was relatively decentralized.  Maritime provinces had lots of autonomy.  Beijing did not try to pre-empt every decision.

Under Xi, China has abandoned the Deng reforms, and reverted to what you might call the Ming tradition of top down control.  It is not an encouraging precedent.

Far from being an economic dynamo, China is on course to becoming the next Japan.  Like China, Japan was once supposed to overtake America.  Instead, a previously thriving, export-driven economy has been reduced to stagnation by demographics and debt.  

China may not become the world’s economic superpower, but this does not mean that China is not a threat.  Quite the opposite. 
 
Just over a century ago, a recently industrialized power, Germany, started to challenge the international order.  Economically and militarily powerful, Germany nonetheless sensed that other powers were not so far behind.  Among German’s leaders there was a sense that if Germany was serious about rearranging the furniture in Europe, she had a limited window of opportunity to do so.  The consequences of that mindset were catastrophic.
 
My fear is that China under the communist party sees herself caught in a similar window of opportunity.  Her demographic calamity, coupled with slow growth, mean that her relative power will only decline.

America is right to be strengthening her fleet in the Pacific (Three cheers to Mississippi Senator, Roger Wicker, for providing such leadership on this – America will be safer for it).   It is also important that America works with an alliance of countries, including Australia and Japan to ensure the security of the Pacific.
 
China might not be the world’s number one economic power, but I suspect she will be the world’s biggest geopolitical headache for the foreseeable future. 

Is Mississippi Really as Poor as Britain_ - The AtlanticDownload

The shame of it! Mississippi has found itself in the humiliating position of being compared disobligingly to the United Kingdom. Just last week, the Financial Times ran a column asking, “Is Britain really as poor as Mississippi?” 

Most Mississippians do not spend much time worrying about comparisons to Britain. The same cannot be said about those on the other side of the Atlantic. For Brits—and I am one, though now based in Jackson, Mississippi—the issue of whether they are more or less prosperous than Mississippi has become a thing. Indeed, the Financial Times now calls it “the Mississippi Question.”

It was nine years ago that Fraser Nelson, the editor of The Spectator, first suggested that the U.K. was poorer than any U.S. state but Mississippi. This came as an uncomfortable shock for many in Britain for whom the word Mississippi conjures up clichés about the Deep South, as a byword for backwardness. Every time anyone has made the comparison since, there has been an indignant outburst from Britons keen to denounce the data.

In practice, when it comes to trying to provide a definitive answer to the Mississippi Question, no uniform, up-to-date set of data exists. But if you take the most recent U.S. figures for GDP per state, divide it by the population of Mississippi, you get a pretty accurate figure for GDP per capita in current dollar values. Make the same calculation for the U.K., with total GDP data divided by the population, and you end up with two comparable numbers.

Last year, by my math, the U.K.’s output per person was $45,485; Mississippi’s was higher, at $47,190. If Britain were invited to join the U.S. as the 51st state, its citizens would be at the bottom of the table for per capita GDP. Some might say that for Mississippi, that is still disconcertingly close.

“That’s not fair!” the critics would counter. “When you compare the wealth of nations, you need to look at how far the money goes. Things cost more in the U.K. than in Mississippi.” To adjust the raw numbers, the argument goes, you need to use an economist’s tool called Purchasing Power Parity. Sure enough, when you consider differences in the price of things in Britain and America, the U.K. does appear richer than Mississippi. Thus, after such PPP adjustments, the Financial Times analyst suggested that for 2021 Mississippi’s per capita GDP was a mere $46,841 to the U.K.’s $54,590 (though conceding that, without the London effect, much of Britain was relatively poorer than the Magnolia State).

“Hold on!” we on Team Mississippi retort. “Why adjust the numbers for our state using U.S. national data?” Here, a dollar goes a lot further than it would in New England or on the West Coast. To produce PPP-adjusted numbers for Mississippi that reflect the buying power of a dollar in places like New York or San Francisco, we say, is absurd. And sure enough, tinkering with the numbers to reflect purchasing power in Mississippi itself makes it doubtful that the U.K. would still come out ahead.

Perhaps more interesting, however, than how you cut the numbers for any given year is the fact that the gap between Mississippi and Britain seems to be growing. Never mind PPP. Just run the numbers for GDP per capita in current dollars for the first part of 2023, rather than 2022, and see that Mississippi’s output is rising at a faster rate than Britain’s.

Over the past 30 years, several southern states have seen rapid economic growth. States like Texas and cities such as Nashville have become economic hubs to rival California or Chicago. North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and even Alabama have all flourished. Mississippi was missing out. Until now.

Historically, business in Mississippi was highly regulated. Licenses used to be mandatory in order to practice many of even the most routine professions. The state has now lifted a lot of these restrictions, deregulating the labor market. According to a recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group representing conservative state legislators, the size of Mississippi’s public payroll has been pared back. In 2013, there were 645 public employees per 10,000 population; today, the number is down to 607. Last year, Mississippi also passed the largest tax cut in recent history, reducing the income tax rate to a flat 4 percent.

How did this come about? Policy makers here have drawn inspiration from the State Policy Network, a constellation of state-level think tanks, borrowing ideas that have worked well elsewhere. We got the idea for labor-market deregulation from Arizona and Missouri. Tennessee inspired us to move toward income-tax elimination. Florida’s success stands as an example of how we could reduce more red tape.

What was once just a trickle of inward investment has turned into a steady flow. Growth is up, visibly: The areas of prosperity along the coast and around the state’s thriving university towns are getting larger, even if pockets of deprivation in the Delta remain.

Perhaps many in Britain find it hard to accept that Mississippi has overtaken them economically because they still think of Mississippi as cotton fields and backwoods poverty, peopled by folk who subsist on God, guns, and grits. But what if Britons’ reluctance to face changing economic realities comes from an outdated perception of themselves?

Most of my fellow Brits like to think that they live in a prosperous free-market society. They have not fully grasped the way in which their country has been sleepwalking toward regulatory regimentation. Stringent new regulations on landlords have seen thousands of owners pull out of the market, resulting in a dire shortage of rental accommodation. New corporate diversity requirements have imposed additional costs across the financial-services sector, with little evidence that bank customers are getting a better deal. Restaurants are required to display a calory count for each serving on their menus.

Individually, none of these restrictions matters all that much. But together, this relentless micromanagement inhibits innovation and growth. And Brits have become so accustomed to government red tape, they no longer seem to see the crimson blizzard that blankets so many aspects of their economic, and even social, life.

To be fair to them, for many years it did not seem to matter that taxes rose and the regulatory burden grew heavier. Thanks to the use of monetary stimulus in place of supply-side reform since the late 1990s, the country’s economy seemed to defy gravity, engineering the sort of growth that high tax and tight regulation might otherwise preclude. Few in the U.K. seemed to notice as ever more aggressive doses of monetary stimulus were required to stave off a downturn. Only now that the option of further monetary stimulus has been exhausted are the cumulative consequences of 30 years of folly becoming apparent.

To recognize that one’s country has been run on a false premise for three decades is difficult. To have to acknowledge that Britain is now poorer than the poorest state in the Union could prompt a moment of self-reckoning that many Brits seem determined to postpone.

Britain’s recurrent fixation with the Mississippi Question tells us as much about the country’s state of mind as it does about GDP. Rather than confront uncomfortable truths, my countrymen dispute the data. Instead of facing up to the consequences bad public policy in Britain, many blame Brexit, or Ukraine.

Putin’s war on Ukraine might have caused higher energy prices, but it alone does little to explain Britain’s poor economic performance. As for Brexit, though opinion formers who originally opposed it love to blame the country’s woes on it now, they never seem to ask why, if leaving the European Union was the cause of Britain’s lack of growth, Britain has still managed to outperform much of Europe.

Since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, the U.K. economy has grown by 5.9 percent. German GDP has only increased by 5 percent. Unlike Germany, the U.K. has so far also managed to avoid recession. Far from a reduction in trade, Britain has seen a boom in exports, especially in the service sector, since withdrawing from the EU trade block. Service exports grew by nearly 18 percent in real terms from 2016 to 2022—the strongest growth in this sector among the G7 countries, according to OECD data, and far more than in neighbors such as Italy, Germany, and France.

In any case, Nelson posed the Mississippi Question nearly two years before Britain voted to leave the EU. The country’s lackluster output, productivity, and growth were apparent long before Brexit. Leaving the EU should have been a perfect opportunity to correct course, but little has been done to address the problem. In fact, after leaving the EU, Britain has been hit by a succession of disastrous policy choices.

Having rushed to impose a lockdown in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, British ministers insisted on ever more draconian measures long after it was apparent that such steps were disproportionate, as well as ruinously expensive. Then, in the name of achieving Net Zero targets on “decarbonizing” the U.K. economy by 2050, successive governments have made rash commitments to move to renewables. Higher energy costs have helped price British industry out of world markets.

Instead of changing course, ministers have stuck stubbornly to their dogma—even though the latest moves to outlaw the internal combustion engine and new emissions regulations are making car ownership unaffordable for millions.

Mississippi has managed to borrow good ideas proven to work elsewhere. Britain, by contrast, has preferred to pioneer its own bad ideas. The former approach helps explains why Mississippi is emerging as part of a wider southern success story. The latter approach accounts for why a once successful country is really struggling.

Why are so many companies "woke"?  Because of the ESG – or environmental, social and governance – agenda that many money managers are pursuing, which is forcing many big businesses to focus on combating climate change and promoting "diversity" ahead of delivering for their customers.  

ESG means that money managers on Wall Street are able to impose their political preferences on businesses in which they invest.  As Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently put it, "ESG is an attempt to impose, through the economy, an ideological agenda that could not win at the ballot box."  

The trouble is that the ESG agenda is winning.  Billions of dollars of professionally managed assets are now used to impose ESG targets on corporate America – and on those that work for them. 

Whatever your own personal political preferences, surely we can all agree that investment managers should not be using other people’s assets to promote ideology?   

Quite apart from the politics, the problem with ESG is that it is not objective. There are different methodologies that various companies use to evaluate their use of ESG. Many of these businesses, it seems, rate their ESG scores on feelings rather than facts, making the process arbitrary  

For example, one might assume that Tesla, a maker of eco-friendly electric vehicles, would have a high ESG rating. False. Tesla has been marked down by many of those that devise various ESG metrics, while various oil-producing businesses are rated highly.   

We believe that it is up to those that own private capital to decide how best to invest it.  Whether or not fund managers, who are merely the custodians of other people’s money, should be free to prioritize investment choices based on their own personal political preferences is perhaps a little less clear-cut.  One thing we should absolutely insist on is that when it comes to allocating public money, investment should be made on the basis of maximizing returns, not promoting political beliefs. 

To that end, several states across the country have implemented policies that prohibit investing on the basis only of ESG. Pension fund managers in states such as Texas, Louisiana and Florida are now required to invest in companies that would generate the best financial outcomes for growing pension funds, instead of ESG-driven objectives and exposing taxpayer dollars to potentially harming risks. This is what we would like to see in Mississippi.  

Currently, Mississippi has no such legislation in place.  In our state, it is up to the state’s ten-strong Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) board to oversee the investment strategy on behalf of around 325,000 PERS beneficiaries.  

We would like to see legislation put in place to ensure that PERS funds are invested in order to maximize returns for those that have paid into the system, rather than promote fashionable causes.   

ESG is, according to Elon Musk "a scam".  Masquerading as a noble cause, "it has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors."  ESG investing will not only cause long-term distortions in the marketplace.  We fear it will ensure lower returns for pensioners whose savings have been managed by the scammers.  Given the already precarious position of Mississippi’s public employee pension system, we believe ESG is something we simply cannot afford.   

A potential bill we would like to see passed during the session calls on the state’s asset managers to comply with the highest standard of integrity to funds and their investments. Due to the ever-changing definition and standards of ESG, Mississippi should take its trust funds, specifically retirement fund money, fiduciarily seriously, and therefore, should act solely in the interests of participants and beneficiaries and invest in funds in a manner that prioritizes the highest return. 

Big Tech has had a wave of complaints leveled against it in recent years, and perhaps rightly so. From assertions of censorship, to excessive digital control, the companies have come under increasing scrutiny. In light of these tensions, some have called for Big Tech companies to be broken up all together, using a policy lever known as antitrust. But is this the best approach?

Many of the grievances against Big Tech carry a lot of weight. Yet, at the same time, Big Tech companies have achieved their large market shares by offering services that have benefitted consumers. Using the power of emerging technologies, consumers have been able to grow their businesses, connect with friends, and engage with society.

This brings in the question of whether or not antitrust is the best way to address the Big Tech challenges. Is an antitrust breakup of Big Tech companies the answer? Isn't there an ever-slight possibility that Big Government solutions could turn out to be worse than the problems with Big Tech itself?

What is antitrust?

In order to understand this debate, it is crucial to define antitrust. At the foundation, antitrust is a collection of laws that seek to ensure competition in the open market. How these laws are interpreted and applied has been a hinge point of the debate.

When antitrust was first instituted in the early 1900s, it was meant to break up the industrial monopolization practices that affected market competition, especially in the oil, rail, and steel sectors. Many of the companies engaged in practices that deliberately sought to corner the market, and then they would charge consumers higher prices for lower quality.

Initially, a company's size and market dominance were often key factors in whether it could be broken up. However, as antitrust law developed, the "Consumer Welfare Standard" became the key litmus test. Under this standard, antitrust action to break up a company can only occur if a company engages in monopolization practices that actually harm consumer welfare.

The danger of government not using the consumer welfare test for antitrust  

Contrasted with this consumer welfare test is when the government simply goes after "big" companies if they have a large market share. This carries the presumption that if a company outperforms most competitors, it must be engaging in anti-competitive behavior. Such actions go against the purpose of antitrust. After all, antitrust is meant to help consumers, not competitors.  

Thus, if antitrust is indiscriminately used as a cudgel to hit large technology companies without having a consumer-grounded reason, this sets a dangerous precedent. In a capitalistic society, companies exist to serve customers and generate capital. Companies growing to be large and serving millions of consumers is a trophy of free-market success. This should be celebrated, not punished.

The Big Tech issue is complex

Yet we return to the question of how to address bad actors within the companies collectively known by many as Big Tech. The issues are complex, and like most complex issues, a broad and heavy-handed government bureaucracy is not the answer.

Rather, specific issues within the Big Tech context should be addressed within the confines of that specific issue. This is critical. While blanket approaches to solving problems may carry political weight, a broad expansion of government power is dangerous. In the words of Ronald Reagan: "The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

In most cases, companies that provide poor services will decline because consumers will not support them with their spending money. The forces of consumer choice have the ability to damage bad actors and poor-performing companies far more than a policymaker ever could. Whether it likes or not, every company is ultimately accountable to the market.

However, this is not to say that policymakers should abdicate their responsibility to address the public policy questions surrounding Big Tech. Rather, they should consider these issues with calculated precision.

If the issue is far-reaching social media censorship, then policymakers should carefully consider that specific issue. If the issue is algorithmic election interference, then policymakers should specifically consider that issue as well. Contrasted with addressing these specific questions, a broad application of antitrust just to "cut down tech companies to size" is not the solution.

Free market growth should not be jeopardized

An antitrust policy that seeks to break up a company because of its size and market share is tantamount to punishing the success it achieved through consumer choice. Rather than using the paradigm that "big is bad," antitrust policy should stick to the consumer welfare standard that takes this consumer choice into account.

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