The FTC has succeeded at a lot of things that just aren't very interesting to report on. I'd recommend reading through FTC press releases. They generally release a statement whenever a major action is started and resolved. By my count in the past year or so the FTC was involved in at least 12 successful anti-monopoly actions (I counted modified mergers, killed mergers, and divestments).

The most consequential merger win was probably the NVIDIA/ARM merger that died under FTC litigation.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/02/...

Of the reports linked, didn't look very inconsequential. A light touch maybe.

Thanks...that's the insight i was hoping for, great links. much appreciated.

Not GP. I would say that her effectiveness is both in Fire and Motion [1], while one wants more Fire, before the status quo was not only no fire, but also no motion. Even the motion is a good starting point that businesses are having management adapt their strategies and plans to account for the motion, just out self-interested risk mitigation in case there is more fire than there currently is today, and that fire gets trained on them.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

A good analogy, but I think you swapped the meaning of fire and motion in your usage of it.

In this case, her cases even if lost would be the equivalent of cover fire. Businesses need to re-act to the cover fire and cannot advance (perform their own motion) while she is firing.

The second part is that you would hope/expect her to be able to gain territory in the near future via the "motion" part of the strategy.

So I agree in your framing, just from my perspective you flipped the terminology.

That seems really bad for the government to be doing this. If she is losing, then using the resources of the government to harass businesses that are acting lawfully seems like fascism.

harassing shitty actors, even if they're technically obeying the law, is not fascism

> didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach?

Progress requires testing the system and seeing where the failure points are. It's significantly better than the relative nothing we've gotten from past admins.

Also with the current judicial and congressional makeup it's a wonder anything gets done.

Using public resources to sue companies, force them to pay for expensive defense in court, and then losing when the court decides they did nothing illegal?

Yes, that is how our justice system works. First, the government accuses you of a crime, then they have to prove that you committed it, and you get to defend yourself.

How else could it possibly work? Companies just get to break the law and no one can ever take them to court over it?

I’m not suggesting the justice system should change. I’m suggesting that civil servants who file and lose a ton of suits should be presumed to be doing net harm. Just as we would for prosecutors in criminal law.

And when it’s politically motivated, it is not just harm in the sense of economic inefficiency, but further is unjust and lowers public trust in institutions.

The problem is that what you're suggesting will eventually boil down to useless regulators. And then companies will do a plethora of suspicious things, and then you the consumer will suffer.

It's the FTC's job to do this kind of thing. If we argue it shouldn't be their job then what will we be doing? Nothing? We've tried the "do nothing" approach more times than any of us can count, and it doesn't work.

A plethora or suspicious things? If the companies are breaking the law, the FTC can sue them and win. If the companies are complying with the law, the FTC should indeed do nothing. If the law is bad, congress can pass new laws.

What's not OK is for the executive branch to not like the law, but be unsuccessful at passing new law through the democratic process, and then use the FTC to unsuccessfully sue companies in order to punish them (and threaten others) with costly legal expenses.

It's not that simple, because people don't know if they're breaking the law. The job of the FTC is to clear that up. It's a fallacy that laws can just be followed or not, almost all the time it's in a gray area.

I’m specifically talking about the situation where you lose almost all the cases. When that happens, it’s not called “clearing up the law”, it’s called frivolous lawsuits.

All law enforcement is by definition politically motivated because it is the politicians that write the laws.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but legislators generally don’t make prosecutorial decisions. Prosecutorial decisions are generally made after legislation is passed, by a different branch of government.

but things that do get done were definitely critically reviewed, so that's something.

I suppose the question is - despite her failures, do we agree with the policy that she / the Biden administration are pushing?

If so, then if she isn't the right person for the job, is there someone who will be more successful?

Her massive political overreach has achieved the goal. The chilly effect on all the behavior they want to stop but don't have the authority too.

It's basically the executive sidestepping the legislator and blocking perfectly legal behavior by the threat of burying it in such long and expensive lawsuits it's not longer viable.