These limitations are why even antitrust specialists look toward other forms of regulation, especially for reining in abusive buyer power. We should absolutely be using antitrust and its remedies to their full capacity, but we shouldn’t rely on them to do all the heavy lifting. And we don’t need to! As historian Gabriel Winant points out, antitrust was far from the only factor that helped labor improve its share in the early twentieth century: “Whether or not you rate antitrust as important, it still beggars belief to see it as a more significant force in the remaking of American society in the 1930s than the insurgency of millions of industrial workers and the wave of reforms they won: the National Labor Relations Act, which established union rights; the Social Security Act, which created the eponymous program as well as family assistance and unemployment insurance; the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage and banned child labor; and, indirectly, legislation touching on housing and urban development, veterans’ policy, and more.” Considered through this more expansive lens, we have plenty of tools to help brake those anticompetitive flywheels and start taking back the value of culture.
sick