Washington, D.C. — The American Economic Liberties Project submitted comments in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s Draft Strategic Plan for 2022-2026 on Tuesday, offering praise for specific changes that demonstrate the agency is serious about stopping corporate crime and righting the commission’s previous wrongs.

Text of Economic Liberties’ comment can be read below. It is also available here. 

We would like to single out for praise two specific changes in this new draft strategic plan. The first is the deletion of the phrase “without unduly burdening legitimate business activity” in the FTC’s mission statement. The second is the addition of the word “policing” to it. Both indicate that the FTC is increasingly interested in stopping corporate crime, and less interested in its decades-long track record of facilitating it.

Here is what the mission statement has said since the late 1990s: 

Our Mission: Protecting consumers and competition by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, and education without unduly burdening legitimate business activity. 

Here is the language in the draft Strategic Plan for 2022-2026: 

The FTC’s Mission: Protecting the public from deceptive and unfair business practices and policing unfair competition through law enforcement, advocacy, research, and education. 

The failure of the FTC is well-understood and relates to a basic deference to corporate power and dominant firms. As just one example, the FTC hasn’t blocked a pharmaceutical merger in the modern era, nor has it blocked or even challenged a merger of Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, four of the most powerful firms in the economy.

The laxity of enforcement has real consequences, from lower wages to higher corporate concentration levels to less innovation and entrepreneurship. In short, the Federal Trade Commission has been an institutional failure for four decades, as we noted in our comprehensive report, The Courage to Learn: A Retrospective on Antitrust and Competition Policy During the Obama Administration and Framework for a New Structuralist Approach. This failure is bipartisan and is largely due to the FTC’s rejection of the rule of law in favor of deference to concentrated corporate power.

Including “without unduly burdening legitimate business activity” to the FTC’s mission statement is problematic for several reasons. First, it is an attack on the rule of law itself, with the commission choosing to overwrite Congressional statute. Congress empowered the FTC to be a policing agency and ensure that business is done fairly, not to hold back on its job because of fake economic theories of business activity cooked up by big business lobbyists in the 1970s. Second, this phrase is a tacit agreement to allow criminal activity to flourish by presuming some sort of balance of legitimate business activity versus law enforcement. In reality, illicit business activity flourishes when there is a lack of law enforcement, not when there is too much. We do not, for instance, tell law enforcers that stopping counterfeiting too zealously creates the risk that people will not trust the dollar. 

Indeed, when counterfeiting is discouraged, there is more faith in commerce, not less. Similarly, when businesses can profit through crime, they will do so, and drive out of the marketplace those who choose to act ethically.

To that end, making it clear that the FTC’s job is to enforce the law and stop unfair business practices is essential information to send to the marketplace. The era of lawlessness should end. We appreciate the change to the FTC mission statement making it clear that the commission agrees.

The full comment is also available here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.