Remarks of Commissioner Mark R. Meador at the America First Antitrust Forum

On Thursday, March 19th, the Bull Moose Institute hosted the America First Antitrust Forum, a gathering to discuss the future of antitrust and competition policy. We were joined by Commissioner Meador, who gave a keynote address & fireside chat. Here is an excerpt of his remarks:

Thank you to the Bull Moose Institute for inviting me to speak with you today. It is an honor to be in a room filled with people who believe, as you do, that America’s future is strengthened by creating conditions for American families and workers to thrive.

Your mission—to relentlessly advocate for a dominant American future—echoes the spirit of a man who refused to accept decline, who championed a muscular American nationalism that put our country’s interests first, and who fought to preserve free and fair competition: Theodore Roosevelt. He understood that a dominant American future requires strong American institutions. It is in that same spirit that I speak before you today.

More than a century ago, Roosevelt stood before a crowd in Osawatomie, Kansas, and delivered one of the most important speeches in American political history. He called it “The New Nationalism.” He was speaking to veterans of the Civil War, men who had bled for the Union, and he told them that their sacrifice would be wasted unless a new generation rose to fight new battles.

In doing so, he spoke not only of battles with rifles and cannons; he spoke of battles of law, of commerce, and of political will. As he put it, “[t]he essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

An America First antitrust policy should pick up from where Roosevelt began: with the recognition that markets have moral content. A free market, as that term has been used in the American tradition, comes from a nation’s commitment to justice in economic life. And justice, as Roosevelt understood it, has a concrete meaning: that each individual should be free to produce, trade, and succeed on his own merits. That commitment—to earned success and equality of opportunity under the law—is what defines free and fair competition. And it is what has allowed America to build the most productive and innovative economy in human history.