OP-ED

Mark Meador and the FTC Scarily Revive Teddy Roosevelt Economics

By Robert H. Bork Jr.

April 02, 2026

Mark Meador and the FTC Scarily Revive Teddy Roosevelt EconomicsNational Archives
For free-market conservatives, Teddy Roosevelt is less a hero than a temptation – a larger-than-life figure whose legacy invites admiration even as it points toward the very expansion of government conservatives resist. That tension is now being exploited by a new generation on the right, eager to wrap progressive antitrust policies in Rooseveltian nostalgia.

For the remaining tribe of free-market, smaller-government conservatives, the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt elicits conflicting impulses.

As the first progressive president, TR inaugurated the era of the nation’s chief executive as an outsized celebrity. Many of TR’s great achievements – in trust-busting, food inspection, and environmental protection – were necessary, but they opened the way for the growth of the regulatory state. In his last campaign for the presidency, the Bull Moose edition of TR ran more or less as an out-and-out socialist, proposing an early version of a comprehensive industrial policy, with government in charge of prices and most business decisions.

In this, TR was prescient. That version of TR would have fit right in with the Biden era of Tim Wu and Lina Khan.

And yet … TR remains one of the most iconic of Republican presidents. And there was that famous grin … and the cowboy duds … and the charge up San Juan Hill. It’s easy to imagine TR in heaven riding happily on a horse alongside Ronald Reagan. On the other hand, Calvin Coolidge, the most reticent of all presidents, may be a small-government conservative’s idea of virtuous modesty, but no child clings to a doll called a Calvin-bear.

So TR nostalgia will always remain seductive. But when some of the new right use TR as branding for today’s most progressive policies in economics and antitrust, alarm bells should go off for true conservatives.

Case in point is the speech that Federal Trade Commissioner Mark Meador gave last week to the Bull Moose Institute. It was a well-crafted speech, rooted in a strong sense of history. Recounting Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” speech, Meador harks back to what seems to him to be the timeless principles of antitrust enforcement – a very American sense of wanting to cut large, unaccountable organizations down to size.

What often gets lost in the nostalgia is that the trusts of TR’s day were nothing like any large business today. When historians write of the trusts’ “ruthless” tactics, they often involved criminal and thuggish acts – from bribery to threats to slaughtering men, women, and children in suppressing strikes. Even the business strategies of trusts in those days, from price-fixing to horizontal conspiracies, are acts that would be plainly illegal today.

Still, Meador sees TR as relevant to antitrust today. He said of the 26th president:

“He did not oppose the great trusts of his era merely because paid consultants told him that consumer prices would fall if he did so. He opposed them because they acted in ways that corrupted free markets: by replacing competition with coercion, earned success with entrenched privilege, and open markets with corporatism. He drew a line, and the line was legal and moral before it was economic. As he stated, with characteristic directness: ‘[w]e draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.’”

And with these words, Meador takes TR’s sheriff’s badge and pins it on his own chest. But does this approach make sense today? Let me enumerate the flaws of TR antitrust revivalism.

Replacing the Consumer Welfare Standard

Meador implies that big corporations today skate by obvious antitrust violations because “paid consultants” are telling policymakers that the efficient production of large enterprises often means cheaper goods. But it isn’t consultants who are instilling this message. It is federal judges and their Consumer Welfare Standard doctrine, which has been in place for almost half a century, since it was adopted by liberals and conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1979. And the goal of that standard is not just cheaper goods, but more choices and innovation to the benefit of consumers.

While the Biden regulators jettisoned the Consumer Welfare Standard in their merger guidelines – and the Trump antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission did nothing to restore it – that standard remains the governing principle of the federal judiciary today.

Without that standard, firmly anchored to the consumer, we would return to arbitrary antitrust in which the whims, biases, and ideology of the regulator and the judge would determine outcomes. This is a recipe for politicized antitrust enforcement and actual censorship, whether it’s Lina Khan going after Twitter, or Trump regulators going after liberal news organizations that offend them.

In harking back to progressive-era antitrust, Mark Meador would abandon antitrust’s only coherent limiting principle.

A Return to “Big Is Bad”

Mark Meador argues that conservatives should embrace aggressive enforcement, with underenforcement as the greater risk. He emphasizes decentralization and automatic suspicion of large firms.

This was the thinking several decades ago that put Walmart in the crosshairs of progressive criticism. But economists countered that they could track a clear “Walmart effect” in declining prices and rising choices for consumers. Today, it is the FTC that is trying to break up Amazon, another action consumers absolutely do not want.

The reason is that large firms often reflect efficiency and economies of scale to the benefit of consumers. Meador’s framework would regress to this “big is bad” doctrine in antitrust, making efficiency potential evidence of a crime.

Undermining the Rule of Reason

The “rule of reason,” popularized in the late 19th century by a federal judge named William Howard Taft, evaluates conduct based on the economic effects of a business practice on competition – and by implication, on consumers. Meador kicked off his tenure with an attack on “fetishized economic analysis” in his essay on “Antitrust Policy for the Conservative.”

It is easy to dismiss “efficiency” as a heartless irrelevancy. But a regulator who governs by what his heart tells him rather than by what the market reveals is like a surgeon who has a great bedside manner, but is incompetent with a scalpel in his hand. A good surgeon may have a poor bedside manner, but he shows fidelity to the patient by being good at his job.

Without the rule of reason, courts lose any way to distinguish procompetitive from anticompetitive conduct. When the sheriff of antitrust acts from intuition and ideology over economics, enforcement becomes political and error-prone.

A Bias Toward More False Positives

In antitrust, a false positive is an act that blocks conduct that would have been beneficial to the economy and the consumer, while a false negative would be a missed antitrust violation.

My father, Robert Bork, famously argued that the errors of overenforcement are far worse because they establish binding legal precedents that stymie innovation across markets. False negatives, on the other hand, may miss a temporary, unfair advantage. But the market has a way of demolishing such advantages much more effectively – and often faster – than the law can.

Remember when Blackberry, Toys “R” Us, and AOL seemed unstoppable?

“Competition is an evolutionary process,” Robert Bork and Ward Bowman wrote in 1965. “Evolution requires the extinction of some species as well as the survival of others. The business equivalent of the dodoes, the dinosaurs, and the great ground sloths are in for a bad time – and they should be. It is fortunate for us all that there was no Federal Biological Commission around when the first small furry mammals appeared and began eating dinosaur eggs. The commission would undoubtedly have perceived a ‘competitive advantage,’ labeled it an ‘unfair method of evolution,’ and stopped the whole process right there.”

The Fatal Vagueness of Moral Framing

America First Antitrust rhetoric is resplendent with rousing phrases like “human flourishing” and the “common good.” To read a speech from Meador or from his former colleague, Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater, is to be flooded with the imagery of real Americans buttering their corn and digging into steaks cooked on the backyard grill under an American flag.

The reality of the new right’s TR-inspired adoption is a move away from a very American approach to antitrust and closer to the hyperactive statism of the European Union. America First Antitrust jettisons the anchor of economics and consumer welfare in favor of the progressive ideas of Lina Khan, allowing big government to wield antitrust enforcement as a weapon, rather than as a tool for economic (and thus, social) advancement.

The new right may think it is reviving Roosevelt. In reality, it is reviving the very progressive project conservatives once opposed – replacing markets with mandates, and economics with politics.

A revived TR antitrust policy for the 21st century would mean the replacement of economics with politics, which can only end in tears for conservatives.

TR is a good role model for human achievement. There are better models for policy.

“Don’t expect to build up the weak by tearing down the strong,” said the 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge. “It is more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”

Robert H. Bork, Jr., is the president of the Antitrust Education Project.

This op-ed appeared orignally in RealClear Markets