Paramount/Warner Bros. & the anti-American campaign to punish success
How a weird coalition of DSA lunatics is trying to stop business growth in America
We just celebrated the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But would the Founding Fathers be pulling their hair out over big government’s obsession with undermining the American bedrock of free market capitalism that made this country great in the first place?
One of the government’s endless string of powers is in the field of “antitrust" laws which supposedly promote fairness and stop companies from being anti-competitive. Often, you’ll see this power being wielded when the government steps in and tries to stop private companies from merging.
Sometimes, this means that mergers are delayed for months while companies deal with the headache of endless hoops put in the way by federal and state governments. But other times, it can even mean that companies are destroyed by government intervention, all under the guise of “fairness” and “competition”
Remember JetBlue and Spirit? Politicians like Elizabeth Warren blocked the merger in the name of “competition” and “fairness”…and Spirit went out of business, meaning less competition in the airline industry.
Because that’s the dirty secret of antitrust! It can just mean the government is putting its thumb on the scale of a deal to destroy the deal OR destroy the company by stopping companies from adapting to survive and grow. The same thing is going on right now with the proposed deal between Paramount and Warner Bros., with left-wing activists pushing a coalition of Democratic state AGs to wage warfare to get in the way of one private company being bought by another private company.
Even though the DOJ already approving the merger, California' AG Rob Bonta is getting involved, as is New York AG Letitia James (seriously, how is she still in office?)
Why? Well, the loudest voices against this merger are coming from a weird political coalition of “No Kings” people, DSA activists, and “Free Palestine” celebrities”, with funding from George Soros types. So I’m sure it’s just a massive coincidence that owners of Paramount, the Ellison family, have committed the two worst crimes in DSA history: be pro-Israel while being successful in business…
But under all of this drama lies an anti-American foundation: business is bad. Consolidation, even if it means businesses survive? Bad. Bigger companies? Bad. Mergers? Bad. Acquisitions? That means you’re rich, so really bad. Because in the DSA mindset, success is a red flag.
Take this bizarre take from anti-merger activist Matt Stoller, who thinks that Mark Zuckerberg burning billions on “dork glasses and failed AI models” is worse than government waste, and that it’s not his money because “he’s stealing from newspapers and publishers”.
That might sound good at a rally in Brooklyn, but it’s not how any of this works.
Mark Zuckerberg runs his own company, funded by investors. If they decide that his “dork glasses and failed AI models” are a waste of money, they will take their investment and go elsewhere. When government decides to waste billions of your tax dollars on their latest ridiculous project, can you cash out your “investment”? Good luck.
In reality, this has nothing to do with the mergers themselves. I actually argued against an earlier version of this merger with Netflix, but as a consumer who can choose whether or not to pay for Netflix, Paramount, Warner Bros. or any other service. Not as someone who wants government to make that decision for me.
At the root of this is a battle over what American capitalism means. Do we let capital move, companies fail, and assets change hands to create new value? Do we let investors take risks and reap the rewards or take responsibility for the losses? Was it good that Bill Gates bet on software, that Steve Jobs bet on iPhones, or that Elon Musk bet on Tesla? Or is it bad because they took a risk and succeeded?
When a company is failing (like Spirit), do we let it find better owners, better management, and more investment AND SURVIVE, or keep it “independent” to die with a whimper? Today, America is looking like the latter. And that’s a problem.
=Want to know where this ends up? Just look at Europe! They’ve dived head-first into the government gatekeeper mentality, and what do they have? Endless regulation, no technology giants, less investment, slower innovation, and (worst of all) no air conditioning.
On July 4, NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani posted this hostage-demand-looking-video lecturing us on the idea that “America is exceptional because we are richer, stronger, more powerful than everyone else.”
According to Mamdani, America is only exceptional because “here, nothing is fixed in place.” Yes, according to Mamdani, America is exceptional because…we might be stupid enough to let people like him run the show and turn American into another failed socialist experiment.
No, America is exceptional because of its foundational principles, and in the context of the economy, we are the world’s powerhouse because we respect private property and we reward risk. In America, we let entrepeneurs build, we let investors invest, and we let companies adapt.
And we don’t ask the government’s permission.
This is what has underpinned American business success, and this is what is under attack by people who — under the guise of antitrust or other emotion-driven promises like equity or justice — want government to decide who wins and who loses. They oppose this merger for exactly the same reason they don’t want you to make a profit from renting out an apartment.
Of course, this doesn’t mean there isn’t room for some opposition to genuine monopolies, albeit given that the solution to monopolization is free market innovation. But we’ve got to recognize that this reflex to reject every major business transaction has nothing to do with antitrust and everything to do with anti-growth greed.
Spirit went bankrupt in the pursuit of fairness. So let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that this has anything to do with free enterprise, free markets, or the ability of Americans to succeed on their own.