Robert Bork Jr., president of The Bork Group and son of the late Judge Robert Bork, told Breitbart News on Friday that Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, is a “celebrity lawyer” for the left planning to use antitrust law to impose “woke standards” onto corporations.
Khan worked at the left-wing and Democrat-aligned New America Foundation and is a graduate of Yale Law School.
“She became [a] sort of a celebrity on the left in antitrust law,” Bork said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow. “She had a decent-looking resume, going to good schools, working for the right people. She was invited into the FTC as a kind of a consultant during the Trump administration by the Chairman, Joe Simons. … but really, she’s very young — nothing against young people — but she doesn’t have a lot of experience, and she really is a bomb thrower who wants to blow up the system.”
Many politicians — primarily Democrats — want “to change antirust law to make it a weapon against business [and] take over a huge swath of the economy,” Bork stated. Such a move “would fossilize capitalism,” he added.
Khan is a “revolutionary” who is “going to basically try out all of her theories on us,” Bork said.
Bork’s father, a professor of law at Yale Law School and legal scholar with expertise in antitrust law, wrote The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, recently updated and republished in April. He said antitrust law, marketed as a tool to facilitate free markets and competition by its political supporters, yielded the opposite effect by entrenching monopolies and oligopolies.
“The title makes perfect sense,” Bork said of The Antitrust Paradox. “It’s a paradox. Antitrust law is supposed to help the economy, help consumers, and what was happening was that it was doing exactly the opposite. Antitrust law has been applied to protect [companies] and not the consumer. It was protecting inefficient companies at the expense of good, well-run, efficient companies.”
Bork said his father was concerned that antitrust law — “a big bludgeon” — would be used by “radical leftists” in the 60s and 70s “to try to hijack the economy.” Antitrust law’s scope and breadth, he explained, “can break up companies” and allows litigants to extract treble damages from businesses.
Bork remarked, “[Khan] has really been able to be a focal point for the left’s dissatisfaction with the state of antitrust law. We have almost 50 years of antitrust law working with this consumer welfare standard [and] pro-consumer approach.”
“Lina Khan wrote an article while she was in law school at Yale … about Amazon, calling it, ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.’ She basically wants to reframe antitrust law to the way it used to be before the consumer welfare standard, a time when there was no real standard. It was very vague.”
Khan views antitrust law as tool for government empowerment, Bork held.
“It’s been a crusade for [Khan] through college and law school, and then working for Elizabeth Warren, working for the very liberal Open Markets Institute. She has really made an effort to bring the law back to where it didn’t make any sense, because that gives government more power.”
Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern
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