Biden's Next Agenda: Anti-monopoly.

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Author: Glastris, Paul

On the last day of September, David Brooks of The New York Times published one of his "Wow, he sounds like a Democrat" columns that so delight liberals of a certain age. In it, he made an impassioned case for the massive spending bills the Biden administration and congressional Democrats were struggling to advance.

The trillions of dollars in infrastructure and social welfare investments, he noted, would predominantly benefit ordinary, just-scraping-by Americans, many of them in red states and lacking college degrees. These are precisely the people screwed by the decades-long, upward redistribution of income and opportunity benefiting big corporations and educated elites. Because that wealth transfer unleashed a populist fury that has destabilized American democracy, the Democrats would be sending an important moral and cultural message:

These packages say to the struggling parents and the warehouse workers: I see you. Your work has dignity. You are paving your way. You are at the center of our national vision. I'd like to think Brooks is right about this...