A free market friend at the FTC: meet Federal Trade Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen.

• Author: Root, Damon
• Position: LAW - Interview

IT'S NOT EVERY day that libertarians find themselves cheering for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the powerful D.C. agency responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust laws. But that day came on October 14,2014, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission.

At issue was whether the dental board, a state agency largely staffed and controlled by licensed, practicing dentists, was guilty of using public power for personal gain when it prevented non-dentists from competing in the state's lucrative teeth-whitening market. In February 2015 the Court ruled against the board's "private self-dealing," with Justice Anthony Kennedy declaring that "active market participants cannot be allowed to regulate their own markets free from antitrust accountability."

It was a resounding defeat for overreaching state regulation. And it came about thanks in no small part to the patient efforts of the FTC's only current Republican commissioner, a self-described devotee of economic liberty named Maureen Ohlhausen. Sitting in her Washington office, Ohlhausen says her vision is for the commission to "promote greater competition and choices for consumers, but also liberty for people who want to enter these businesses." The victory in North Carolina Dental "was the culmination of 15 years of efforts."

Many of those efforts involved reforming the way the FTC itself does business. "The more you focus on private anti-competitive behavior," she says, "the more incentive people have to run to the state and try to get the state to bless what they're doing." That's why Ohlhausen and her allies have been pushing the FTC to use its antitrust authority against protectionist state regulations, including occupational licensing.

At first the agency's antitrust litigators resisted the strategy. "They kept saying, 'No, we'll never win,'" she says. But eventually they came around and, in the end, the FTC did win.

Not surprisingly, Ohlhausen's free-market views have ruffled feathers on both sides of the political aisle. "The Democrats [at the FTC] say, well, we don't want to seem like we're against all regulations," she says. Meanwhile "the Republicans might be worried about trammeling too much on state rights and state prerogatives."

What about those federalism concerns?, I ask. Should we be worried about the FTC asking the federal courts to overrule state regulations or state licensing boards...