The problem with #BossBabe leftism

Rereading the urtext of the New Antitrust Movement

Be your own boss! Get that grindset! Hustle! (Photo by MoMo productions/Getty Images)

What should the goal of economic policy be? Ideally, a political party would have a clear answer to that question, one it could convey to voters and translate into specific proposals. Yet the Democrats currently lack any sort of unified economic vision. In its absence, the intellectual wings of the various factions that make up the party have been left to battle with one another in the hopes that their competing visions will set the party’s economic agenda for the next election cycle.

One of the factions that is best situated to fill the current policy void, at least partially, is the New Antitrust Movement, which won converts and gained influence during the Biden presidency.¹ Over the last 15 years, this movement has gradually built out an impressive political apparatus, including foundation-funded political organizations like the Open Markets Institute, American Economic Liberties Project, and More Perfect Union, media footholds at places like The American Prospect, a stable of elected officials like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a set of semi-celebrity bureaucrats including Jonathan Kanter, Tim Wu, and Lina Khan.

For most modern political factions, it is hard to pinpoint their exact origins. They seem to emerge from a variety of disparate sources and cultural shifts that can only be described impressionistically. But this is not so for the New Antitrust Movement. Unlike other Democratic factions, it has an identifiable individual founder: Barry Lynn. It also has what is essentially a founding document: Lynn’s 2009 book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

Sixteen long years later, Cornered’s diagnosis of what ails the American economy remains quite influential even though many of the illustrative industries Lynn diagnosed as unacceptably concentrated have since been disrupted by new entrants. More importantly, despite its big flaws, the idea that the proliferation and protection of small business owners is itself an important goal that supersedes more conventional goals like efficiency, growth, and labor protection has taken hold of a large portion of the policy-focused left, with no retreat on the horizon.

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In the decade before the Biden administration began, the Democratic intelligentsia coalesced around three big economic policy topics. According to this rough consensus, the nation needed:

1. Fiscal stimulus to bring the economy back to full employment

2. An expansion to our internationally lagging welfare state

3. A reconstruction of the nation’s energy infrastructure aimed at eradicating carbon emissions

In the first two years of his administration, Biden went to work on all three fronts. He primed, or possibly flooded, the fiscal pump with the American Rescue Plan Act and partially kick-started the fossil-free transition with the Inflation Reduction Act. He also attempted to expand the welfare state in areas like child care and paid family leave through the Build Back Better Act, but that effort ultimately sputtered, and Biden left the White House having made no permanent impact on the social benefits system — a singular distinction among Democratic presidents over the past 100 years.

One consequence of Biden’s big policy push is that — whether due to completion or exhaustion — these particular policy fixations have mostly faded into the background. The Democrats lost the ability to pass meaningful legislation after the 2022 midterms and high inflation dominated the policy debate from thereafter. When Kamala Harris was swapped in for an ailing Biden, she presented as her formal policy agenda a slapdash collection of half-baked ideas nominally aimed at tackling the high cost of living.

Nothing much has changed in the Democratic policy world in the 11 months since Harris’ defeat. It is rudderless and spent, with no clear positive economic policy vision for the future.

I first read Cornered in 2016, shortly after the New Antitrust Movement came onto my radar. As someone steeped in the socialist canon and its prognosis of what ails capitalism, I must admit that I did not find the overall argument of the book all that persuasive. The economic coercion and destructive profit-seeking that Lynn rails against are very real. But, to my mind, those things emerge from more fundamental defects in the capitalist system, not, as the book argues, from the mere presence of large firms.

But even with that basic disagreement, I found the book fascinating. Unlike most policy books, Cornered sketches out a truly offbeat philosophical view about what the goal of economic policy should be and then proceeds to plausibly apply that view across a wide range of policy topics.

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Cornered begins by taking the reader through a short tour of some real-life monopolies. Prior to becoming a full-time political activist, Lynn was a business reporter and his reporting and storytelling skills are on full display in this part of the book. He describes a variety of mergers that took place in the early 21st century and the way in which some large firms exert pressure on their suppliers.

But some aspects of these early chapters fall flat, especially in retrospect. Lynn spends a large share of Chapter 2 of the book, which is titled “Supply and Command,” on the eyewear monopoly Luxottica and on concentration in the beer market led by Anheuser‑Busch InBev and MillerCoors (now called Molson Coors).

Luxottica, which is mentioned 31 times in the book, is described as a pincer monopoly that rolled up eyewear retailers like LensCrafters, Sears Optical, and Sunglass Hut in order to then take over eyewear makers themselves like Ray-Ban and Oakley. According to Lynn, Luxottica provides “one of the more dramatic illustrations of the march to monopoly.”

Yet one year after Cornered was published, four business students started a direct-to-consumer eyewear company called Warby Parker that went on to huge market success, eventually becoming a multibillion-dollar publicly traded company. In the 15 years since it was founded, Warby Parker has consistently grown its retail share, which now stands at 7.2% of the eyewear market. The eyewear sector in 2009 may have been too concentrated for Lynn’s liking, but it was apparently a contestable market in which new entrants could successfully compete.

Lynn begins his discussion of the beer market with a celebration of the 1978 deregulation of beer production, which legalized home brewing and is credited as giving rise to the craft beer movement. Lynn celebrates craft beer for injecting some additional variety into the beer market but then argues that this seeming burst of competition and product offerings is somewhat illusory. Per Lynn, the total effect of craft beer “on the nation’s beer industry remains quite small” as “all the microbreweries and brewpubs together accounted for less than 4 percent” of the total beer volume. Furthermore, the success of craft brewing is, according to Lynn, in serious jeopardy as “there are growing signs that the megacorporations are once again turning their sights onto the craft beer makers” as “raw materials like hops are suddenly in short supply, and the distribution channels, even more consolidated than in 1996, are suddenly and without explanation closed off.”

This cautionary tale about Anheuser‑Busch InBev, Molson Coors, and other beer monopolists choking off independent craft beer competitors has not borne out. Since Cornered was published, the market share of craft beer more than tripled to 13.3% of beer volume and 24.7% of the total beer spend. The number of breweries increased sixfold from 1,653 in 2009 to 9,922 in 2024. As with eyewear, beer proved to be much more open to competition from the smaller guys than Lynn seemed to realize.

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These factual developments would be undermining if you analyze monopoly and competition the way economists typically do, but they don’t really negate the main argument of Cornered. This is because, as he outlines in the middle third of his book, Lynn’s advocacy in this area is ultimately driven by an unconventional philosophical viewpoint about what the goal of economic policy should be.

Most discussions about economic policy design revolve around goals like output, efficiency, and distributive justice. There is philosophical disagreement about what weight to give these various goals and empirical disagreement about whether, or to what extent, they trade off with one another. But they are, nonetheless, the verbal currency of those debates.

Lynn’s philosophical move in Cornered is to reject these things as proper goals. He pejoratively describes those who emphasize economic output as being fixated on “producing ever greater piles of stuff” and describes efficiency as “a code word for top-down autocratic rule by the lords of the private corporate estates or the ‘public’ state.” The usual topics of distributive justice — poverty, inequality, and desert — simply go unaddressed.

For Lynn, the ultimate goal of economic policy is “to reveal, harness, and direct power within a society in order to ensure the widest possible distribution of political freedom and the greatest possible degree of political and economic stability.” This is achieved by “ensuring citizens the freedom to withhold work, to choose their own business partners, to move to another town or another state, and to never be forced to beg favor of another person” and by ensuring them “freedom from arbitrary rule” by making it so that anyone who wants to can “afford to open a small and independent business.” According to Lynn, “for many, if not most, of us, the real American Dream is not to get rich but simply to be our own boss.”

What this all amounts to is the view that “increasing the freedom of the small producer” should be the primary goal of economic policy. The ultimate problem with large firms is not that they increase prices or create barriers to entry or stifle innovation. Some large firms may have those effects while others don’t or have the opposite effects. But what all large firms have in common is that their existence reduces the number of people who can own and operate a small business. And since, according to Lynn, the ability to run a small business is the sine qua non of human freedom, large firms are inherently antagonistic to economic and political liberty.

The basic math of this anti-bigness argument is impossible to refute. If the United States were to redistribute its GDP across a vast number of new small firms, that would mechanically increase the number of small business owners. This may have certain other negative effects, including on efficiency and output, but Lynn is very clear in saying that he is willing to sacrifice those things for the greater good of small-producer freedom.

What is contestable is whether Lynn is right to order these competing values in the way that he does, and whether Lynn is right that maximizing the number of small businesses actually liberates people from economic coercion better than alternative policy approaches. It is on this latter point where Lynn’s argument really falls short.

Lynn’s worldview condemns the majority of people to unfreedom. If the only way for an individual to avoid being economically coerced is if they can start a small business, then only the minority of the population with a certain level of specific entrepreneurial skills will ever be free. Even if we were to hugely increase the number of small businesses in the country, the vast majority of individuals would still be mere employees, subject to the whims of a boss and the labor market more generally.

Further, the freedom Lynn promises is illusory — is the life of a small proprietor truly so unencumbered? A small business owner may lack a boss but is still subject to the arbitrary whims of the product market that they are forced to serve.

Lynn’s understanding of small producers is heavily informed by Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, but a yeoman is a semi-subsistence farmer who primarily produces for their own consumption, not for a consumer market. In Chapter 5 of Cornered, Lynn profiles a dairy farmer in Tennessee named Ronald Hazelwood who he describes as “one of America’s last remaining yeoman farmers.” But Hazelwood is actually not a yeoman because he lives, not primarily by producing for his own consumption, but by selling milk in the product market. It is this exposure to the product market, which all non-subsistence producers have, even in Lynn’s system, that makes Hazelwood economically dependent and vulnerable despite not having a boss.

If the “freedom to withhold work,” the “freedom from arbitrary rule,” and the right to “never be forced to beg favor of another person” are your guiding values, then the best policy is not trying to increase the number of entrepreneurial opportunities but instead creating a universal social-democratic welfare state that is so comprehensive and generous that workers in bad situations have a genuine ability to exit the market by relying on social benefits.

Lynn never addresses this possibility in Cornered, probably because his book focuses exclusively on America, even in the intellectual history and philosophical chapters, and this particular welfarist argument comes primarily from European thinkers, such as the Danish sociologist Gøsta Esping-Andersen.

Beyond the welfare state, production itself could also be steered in worker-protective ways through the labor code, selective public ownership, corporate codetermination, and the countervailing power of unions. Lynn is familiar with this particular argument. In Cornered, he attributes it primarily to the “democratic socialism” of John Kenneth Galbraith.

Lynn never mounts a direct argument against this alternative, but instead attacks it by saying that the effort to promote it helped lead to our current state of affairs. Thus, he dismisses Galbraith and the democratic socialists by holding them partially responsible for an economic system that is clearly at odds with what they propose.

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The battle of ideas is not always won by philosophical and technical rigor, but more often by the ability to attract disciples, influence powerful people, and establish institutions to proliferate an idea through the culture. The arguments in Lynn’s Cornered have definitely accomplished the latter despite their many weaknesses.

Although I don’t find Lynn’s approach to economic philosophy particularly compelling, it is hard to deny the impact that it has had and its potential political potency for the years ahead. In her 2017 law school note — “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” — then soon-to-be FTC Chair Lina Khan credits Barry Lynn “for introducing me to these issues in the first place.” Even now, 16 years after Cornered and eight years after her law school note, Khan continues to sound a lot like Lynn, such as when she wrote last month in The New York Times that “Business owners enjoy the freedom and self-determination that come with being their own boss and the sense of stewardship that comes with knowing the buck stops with them.”

In addition to making Khan the FTC chair, the Biden administration pushed antimonopoly policy by appointing other Lynn-favored bureaucrats to the FTC and the Justice Department and pursuing some small-bore policies like extending grants to mom-and-pop slaughterhouses. But antitrust is hardly a completed or exhausted policy area like fiscal stimulus, climate, and welfare expansion seem to be. It is also one of the only policy areas that is able to genuinely tap into a populist rhetoric while avoiding contentious policy levers like public ownership, tax and spending hikes, and union promotion.

In the coming intraparty battle, Lynn’s movement could lose out against alternatives focused on “affordability.” Long shot candidate Zohran Mamdani decisively won the Democratic nomination for New York City mayor by maintaining a laser focus on that theme, and once elite Democrats finally make it through their grieving process over his victory, they may eventually decide that is a good strategy for Democrats more generally.

In theory, Lynn and his disciples are vulnerable to that kind of alternative because one of their defining stances is that the quest for affordability, defined as low consumer prices, is misguided and should give way to the more important value of small-business freedom. In practice, however, in the 16 years since Cornered was published, the New Antitrust Movement has become sophisticated enough to realize that, when not writing books, it’s better to pretend an America of small grocers would provide lower prices than big-box stores or that housing affordability is largely a question of concentration, rather than to try to convince voters that lowering prices is relatively unimportant. It could work for them.

1. The other nascent policy framework percolating through the Democratic party is the so-called “abundance agenda,” which, in direct contrast to Lynn, puts a very high value on output and efficiency, especially in certain areas like construction and innovation. The New Antitrust Movement is likely to take issue with this agenda for all sorts of reasons, including that a single-minded emphasis on output may favor large firms over small firms, thereby making things worse, at least when it comes to economic freedom as Lynn defines it.