Dismantling the regulatory state will have ripple effects that policymakers likely haven’t considered yet. One of them is quite possibly a new era of antitrust liability in industries that haven’t had to worry much about that before.
In the past, when enforcing the antitrust laws has conflicted with a comprehensive regulatory scheme, federal courts have recognized that such a scheme can supplant the Sherman Act. The courts call this an “implied repeal” of the antitrust laws, and it’s an ad hoc defense to lawsuits claiming that conduct in a particular regulated industry is illegally anticompetitive.
The bases ...