The Poverty of Vanceonomics (Samuel Gregg, 1/14/26, Civitas Outlook)
[A]t the core of Vanceonomics is a preferential option for government intervention. Vance, for example, has spoken in favor of raising the federal minimum wage and even supported to that effect as a senator, despite the well-documented negative economic that such raises have on the job prospects of younger, poorer, and less-educated Americans.
This is not the only area in which Vance’s economic position aligns with the preferences of American progressives. Vance’s support for expansive antitrust laws that go far beyond the consumer welfare standard, which assesses the impact of proposed mergers and conduct on consumers, places him in the same camp as Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Federal Trade Commissioner Lina Khan, the latter of whom Vance once as “doing a pretty good job.”
Past and present advocates of expansive applications of antitrust insist that such measures ensure that large corporations don’t destroy market competition by leveraging their greater resources to establish monopolies by crushing medium- and small-sized businesses that might become potential rivals. In the past, Vance’s opposition to what Justice William O. Douglas once “The Curse of Bigness” was particularly directed against big tech companies. In February 2024, for example, Vance for the breakup of Google.
Vance’s antitrust views directly clash with long-standing critiques of expansive antitrust advanced by scholars such as, and. They pointed out that U.S. antitrust laws have been characterized by vaguely worded statutes and complex case law that introduce excessive uncertainty into the economy by making standard business practices, such as exclusive contracting, potentially unlawful. The subsequent shift towards the consumer welfare standard in court decisions from the late-1970s onwards simplified matters by focusing attention upon what really matters: the principle of consumer sovereignty, thereby limiting the type of government interventions that actually competition in the name, perversely enough, of preventing monopolies.
By contrast, Vance’s antitrust views downplay the extent to which more expansive understandings of such laws have been weaponized by companies to undermine existing competitors, but also by government officials seeking to punish businesses that refuse to cooperate with whoever is in the White House. Presidents ranging from to have gone down that path.
There is reason to be concerned that Vance might bring that outlook to the conduct of economic policy more generally. The vice-president has, after all, associated himself with those conservatives who have adopted the New Right’s friend-enemies logic to legitimize using the state to punish one’s political opponents. Penalizing people for their political views is hardly the purpose of, for instance, tax policy in any society that takes the rule of law seriously. Yet there have been occasions when Vance has expressed a desire to raise taxes on specific groups because of what he [sees] as their willingness to side with a “global oligarchy” instead of the United States.
