Hey everybody, I don't know about you, but as you've watched out over the world, the war in Russia and Ukraine is not just isolated to Eastern Europe, it's spread all over the world and you can see it in market instabilities, you can see it here.
People who do not think that that war is affecting you, all you gotta do is look at gas prices, you look at your food prices, you see the global change that has happened.
But you know something that's also affected investments as well, and I've said all along, Legacy Precious Metals is your navigator.
They're the ones that see you through to get to the next level.
The good news about this is, even with market volatility, market instability, you've got options.
And gold prices are rising as investors turn to gold, and gold presents a hedge against this inflation and that protects you against the weakening dollar, which we are seeing.
Legacy Precious Metals is the only company I trust to deal with gold and silver and the other precious metals.
You need this investment.
You need this as part of your portfolio to keep you buffered from what we're seeing in the world.
War and volatility in the market.
This is where you need to be.
Call Legacy Precious Metals today.
Be proactive about this.
Get on board with it.
Call them at 866-528-1903, 866-528-1903.
Or you can download their free investors guide at LegacyPMInvestments.com. LegacyPMInvestments.com, your navigator in a volatile world of investments.
You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the podcast.
This is just an honor.
When you get to have people who are experts in their industry and experts in the field, this is when you get to learn.
And this is what I've always learned about, I love about our podcasts.
We share, as you well know, we go from politics to hunting to technical issues of copyright with songwriters, with everything.
Because I want you, and I believe that a good conservative, someone who is, one, broadly read, but also broadly understands the issues of It's going on in Washington.
And many times, mainstream media will never touch this stuff.
So today, with a lot of things going on with big, there's a sentiment going on in the world that just because you're big, you're bad.
And this is very much of a liberal sentiment.
We're seeing it, especially in this Senate.
We're hearing it from even President Biden and others.
But the reality is, is we do have antitrust laws.
We do have things that are out there to protect the consumer.
And it is my just joy today to have Bob Bork Jr. on.
He has been a leader in this industry, not only following up on what his father Robert Bork had done, Judge Bork had done, but in his own right working with us today.
Bob, welcome to the podcast today.
It's such a pleasure to finally be on.
I'm sorry about the delays, but here we are.
Yay.
We made it.
Well, to get everybody started off, tell us about what you're doing now, your organization, and then we're just going to dive head deep into this stuff.
Uh, the, the, the semi-short version is that, uh, for a long time I was a reporter and then got sick of that, uh, and decided to get a grownup job and, uh, worked, uh, uh, in, uh, in, in corporate communications and strategy.
Uh, but most recently, and, and really this is a labor of love, uh, for my, uh, you know, for my father, uh, I saw in 2016 or so that Elizabeth Warren and others were having sort of their left-wing Appalachian meeting to discuss how to hijack antitrust and turn it into a weapon against business.
Not just big business, all business.
And my first thought was, well, I wonder where my dad's book is.
And he had written A book called The Antitrust Paradox in 1978, but it was out of print and you couldn't find it unless you wanted to spend three, four hundred dollars on an old copy.
So I decided we needed to get the book back into print.
And I asked Mike Lee, Senator Mike Lee, to write a new book.
introduction and I wrote a new forward and it took some time, but we got it out.
It's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
It's very readable.
Anyway, I thought I need to start with that.
And then I thought this is getting ugly, particularly when Joe Biden won the White House and the And you saw lots of really insane legislation and the appointment of Lena Kahn, who is just a Marxist, you know, put in charge of the FTC, decided we had to get in there and start fighting.
So I created the Antitrust Education Project, And have been doing lots and lots of media and writing pieces in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere to try to explain why the consumer welfare standard, which was my father's contribution to antitrust back in 1978,
and has been basically the operating system for antitrust enforcement for the last 43 years, ought to be preserved against these lunatics, forgive me, who want to tear it all down And make antitrust a woke weapon against corporations.
Let's break this down, Bob, because I think one of the things out there is because the media is willing accomplices in this fight, because one, they're lazy many times and they don't want to get into the details of this.
And Elizabeth Warren and her cloud con, rest of them, they have a, as you said, rightfully so, they're weaponizing.
I saw this as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, sitting on the Judiciary Committee, working on the Intellectual Property Committee, the Antitrust Subcommittee.
These were all areas that we began to see under the Obama administration, this move away.
It was this, as an old friend of mine, and he's now deceased, but we spoke about it offline, is Orrin Hatch gave a wonderful speech on the Senate floor base where he called it the hipster antitrust.
And it was moving away from like what your dad had said, this consumer protection, and is the company just because it's big is bad?
In a small way to break this down, if you're an average listener out there, and we're getting some of this mixed up, I think, with the conservative bias that we see in some of the tech companies, the Facebooks, the Googles, and we need to separate that out.
So from a real building block perspective, such as you would think about here, Why should people be concerned about this?
I mean, instead of it just being the rantings of Elizabeth Warren or Khan being appointed as head of the...
Why should average individuals be concerned about what they're seeing right now?
The origin of antitrust law, and people ask me, why is it called antitrust law?
The first pieces of it were written back in the late 19th century to deal with the enormous size of corporations who were organized into trusts, like the Standard Oil Trust and the Railroad Trusts.
And so the law was antitrust.
But the legacy of all that has been up until about 1980, 1978, sorry, when my father wrote this book, was that big was bad.
The Supreme Court, Justice Louis Brandeis and Justice William O. Douglas, Ruled time after time that any company that was inefficient, the small was better, and they had to protect small businesses and worthy men, as they referred to it.
And so what they ended up doing, though, was they created this paradox my father talked about in the book, where they were actually protecting inefficient companies Which led to consumers paying higher prices, led to less innovation, less job creation.
And my father taught himself calculus and started writing about this in the 60s, and ultimately with his book in 1978, proved that the law wasn't working, just simply was not leading to the results that benefited Our society.
And not as he thought they had intended when the laws were written.
So he referred to consumer welfare as really the goal of antitrust.
And interestingly, somebody picked that up and put it in a brief to the Supreme Court in an antitrust case a year after the book came out.
And the court said, that's right.
That's what it is.
That's what we're trying to do here.
And now we've made sense of this nonsensical antitrust law.
So it's about the consumer.
You know, the foremost benefit of the consumer welfare standard is that it enables, you know, price reductions and efficiencies and opportunities in the marketplace that weren't there before, that were squashed by the way the law was being interpreted.
And so, to answer your question in a very roundabout way, the consumer benefits.
And that is a neutral principle, unlike the principles they were applying for.
It's a neutral principle.
It's a small d democratic principle.
You vote with your dollars.
You vote with where you go to shop.
And the consumer welfare standard makes it possible for the companies that supply the goods and services that you want to do so at the greatest efficiency, regardless of the size.
And I think what you've hit there is something that is being lost, and it was definitely hard for many of us when we dealt with this in Congress to get through, because especially in the last few years, the prevailing idea around this is that if it's big, that it is bad.
I think that's become the understanding, and I hear this all the time from members, you heard it from members of Congress, I heard it from members of the media, that would say simply because something is big, and let's just say Name your company, from Amazon to Exxon, whatever.
It's bad and it inherently causes problems in the marketplace.
What's your dad's book and what your foundation is actually looking at, though, is going back to that true understanding is, does this protect the consumer?
And by being big, is there an exhortation or something or forcing of these bigger companies to keep people out of the marketplace or to exhort an inordinate problem in the marketplace?
Right.
Why do you think that builds?
I mean, it's easy to, I guess, understand why the, quote, big is bad thing.
How do we overcome that, though?
Because the reality of most Americans is that they use these companies.
I mean, they enjoy going to Walmart.
It's an interesting sort of bipolar kind of concept here.
Well, you remind me of my grandmother, my father's mother, the Late Elizabeth Bork, who I remember saying when we were living in New Haven, Connecticut, when he was teaching at Yale Law School, that she was grumbling about the corner grocery store, the Orange Street Market, and why they didn't have a lot of things and why, you know, and the prices were high.
And so she was starting to go to the supermarket.
You know, this is probably in the 60s, 70s.
And that was an example of how Big made her life better, but she was grumbling about the small being, you know.
And so instead of preserving small, We, you know, we've, companies found, big box stores found ways to, Walmart is a perfect example.
Walmart has achieved so much for the consumer.
I mean, I think I saw a number, estimated $260 billion in savings to consumers over $2,300 per household in 2004. You know, big isn't necessarily bad.
And let me just say this, big is not illegal.
And in fact, monopoly is not illegal.
It's how you got it and what you do with it.
Do you abuse your monopoly power?
Do you abuse the marketplace?
Do you squeeze people out?
Do you predatory price?
Do you offer such low prices that people can't compete with you?
Those are all issues in antitrust that need to be addressed.
And I'm first to say that I'm not here to protect big companies.
I'm here to protect the consumer welfare standard.
So if a company is in violation of antitrust law, the existing antitrust laws, and if there's a market where you can show they have market dominance and they're abusing it, Then go at them, you know, right away.
Exactly.
One of the things that's come up in recent years is not just the consumer side of this, and especially as, you know, again, this is an evolving, you know, has standard, even though your father's book was from the 70s and it come out, but this is a whole thing from back in the antitrust, as you said, standard oil, the other issues of trust.
Where it's just a consumer.
But there is now becoming more and more of an element given platforms.
And let's take this conversation a little bit differently, like to a sales platform.
Instead of it being like your grandmother going to the corner store and having the supermarket up the street, now you're dealing a lot in the internet.
You're dealing a lot of the online kind of aspects.
There's a move in a way.
Do you see one of the concerns that is brought up many times by others is the business-to-business aspect that is not seen by the consumer necessarily, but it is taking some of these larger companies, especially in the areas of copyright, patents, those kind of issues.
Is that an area that has really caused some of the bigger companies to run afoul?
Of people who just think big is bad because they can use their market size to buy up companies or to take over technologies, those kind of things.
Excuse me.
Is that something that you see that maybe has influenced the Elizabeth Warrens, the cons of the world?
Well, let's set them aside because, frankly, they're socialists.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Their motivations are not based on You know, a realistic understanding of market economics, okay?
So those people are out there.
But there are concerns, and I don't disallow those concerns, that a company that is big might abuse its power and its bigness in a particular market.
Maybe it's squeezing out a smaller competitor, or maybe it's buying a competitor.
But again, I think we're in somewhat different times than we were even 50 years ago or 30 years ago.
Where a lot of these companies have become essentially venture capital firms.
You know, I mean, a lot of small companies want their strategy, their plan is, I'm going to invent something, I'm going to build it up, and then I'm going to sell it to Amazon or I'm going to sell it to Facebook or whatever.
And then, you know, Like Instagram or most recently, this virtual reality game company called Within Global, I think, tried to sell itself to Meta, Facebook parent.
And for $440 million, which is like, you know, the kind of change they find in their car seats, it's not real money.
But, you know, it got blocked by the FTC. They're suing to stop that.
And that's an interesting story in and of itself because it's about what you might call pre-crime.
There is no evidence that I can see or anybody else's can see that buying that company would create a monopoly for Meta.
But they think maybe sometime down the road, there would be a monopoly there or there would be, you know, they would control the metaverse.
So we're going to stop it now.
Before the crime, you know, like rogue police, we're going to come in like Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report and break it up before it happens.
So I think I've kind of wandered off your question a little bit.
No, but I think you're right in that.
In a sense, a lot of this now has become, it's not what's happening now, it's become the preemptive.
It's become the law school Socratic question.
What if this happened and this happened?
And that's not a good way to develop any law, and much less one that is as fluid as antitrust.
Exactly.
And the reason they like antitrust, of course, is because it is a gigantic club.
It can be, you can break up a company with antitrust law, or in the, you know, bringing private lawsuits, you can get treble damages in antitrust.
So it's a big weapon.
In fact, you know, Dad wrote this book, The Antitrust Paradox, started to work on this area because he was concerned back in the 60s that the socialists were going to try to use antitrust To grab hold of the economy.
And of course, that's what's happening now, is the socials are using antitrust to grab hold of the economy.
But you made another interesting point, if I might, you know, about stopping things before they happen.
That is spreading globally now.
You know, there was this merger between, attempted merger between Illumina and Grail.
Grail was a company that Illumina had started and spun off, and then they wanted to buy it back after they had, after Grail had developed these medical technologies.
And The FTC has tried to block that, but ultimately they have failed.
Their own ALJ refused to block it.
And now in Europe, the European economic authorities, antitrust authorities, are going to block it, have said they're going to block it, even though Illumina and Grail have no business in Europe.
They don't actually sell anything in Europe.
They don't make anything in Europe.
And they've ordered to block the deal over there.
That's where we are.
That's how totally insane this has all got.
Well, and it goes back to, you know, sort of the, you know, you said to set it aside, but in some ways you can't set it aside.
When you have a collectivist mentality, when you have a socialist kind of mentality, again, anything that interrupts what they believe government should be involved in It becomes fair game.
Whether it's a reality or non-reality, you set up the paper tigers and you attack them.
And I think this is what we're seeing many times in this.
And they're using it under the cloaked and dagger terms, if you would, well, antitrust.
And they use the terms that people aren't familiar with, and then they just sort of always go back to, well, the big is bad, and so it's destroying our world.
And that's just problematic.
And what you mentioned, we're seeing this a lot in Europe as well.
And Europe's taking, as you said, a step further than even what we're seeing some here in the U.S. And my unfortunate opinion is we've got judges in the U.S. who are now looking to Europe as a model for some of this stuff.
How do we get by that?
I think that's going to be the next thing is convincing people because the reality is protecting consumers and this is where we need to look at it so that it is properly used.
But do you think most people are even aware that this is being used as a tool more than what the mainstream media or the others are wanting to be said as?
No, I don't think most people are aware.
And most people probably just...
It makes sense.
Big means power, and I'm afraid of power.
And of course, the other thing that's driving it is this conservative censorship problem from some of these platforms.
So that's why you have people like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley.
Well, Josh Hawley is another case altogether.
Yeah.
In this arena, yes.
Sensible people like Chuck Grassley, who are buying into this nonsense because they say that they're doing it because they're concerned about conservative censorship, and so am I. But I argue that antitrust is not about fixing a censorship problem.
It is an economic policy.
It's a legal policy designed to protect consumers and not to solve that.
That's a Section 230 issue.
That's a free speech issue.
Let's go over there and dig into that, but don't use the antitrust laws to do it.
But that's the little shiny object that Amy Klobuchar is hanging in front of the conservatives Exactly.
Well, the one thing, and again, if Amy Klobuchar is hanging something in front of conservatives to entrast the scourges, they need to be concerned to start with.
This is, you know, again, and I'll use a quick anecdotal story.
When I was ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, this was after I'd been working through, you know, Chairman Goodlap beforehand on antitrust.
But when I became a ranking member, there was this, again, this built budding up of antitrust.
And Cicilline, David Cicilline, wanted to work on this.
So we said, we'll do hearings.
And we set the parameters of the hearings.
Okay, if you're wanting to deal with these issues of censorship and other things, that's fine.
But also, we're going to deal with it in antitrust, in the true antitrust sense.
And that's consumer side.
About halfway through the hearings, because the Democrats were leading this, we saw that it was simply just, let's get these big companies in here and bash them.
And we said, no, that's not what we want.
But yet, I'll be honest with you, we took some flack from conservatives who bought the wrong argument here that antitrust was where you attack Section 230, which, frankly, and I've talked about it on this podcast, Section 230 has enough teeth in it right now to shut down the abuses that we're talking about.
We've just got a DOJ that doesn't want to prosecute the cases based on an old court case that they say they can't.
That's just wrong.
But this is where we've got to overcome it.
How does your organization do that?
How can we continue to get this message out that antitrust is there to protect the consumer?
And yes, it protects them from the big, bad companies, but it also protects our free enterprise system as we know it.
Exactly.
Again, I go back to...
Let's not talk about...
I don't talk about antitrust so much as I talk about the consumer welfare standard, which is the operating system which drives antitrust enforcement now, which is what the courts...
And the courts are the things that are...
It's the branch of government that's protecting the consumer right now.
Because, as you can see, Amy Klobuchar and the Democrats want to tear down the consumer welfare standard.
And they can do that just by passing a statute, changing the law.
And then the courts have to follow what they do.
Well, supposedly what they have to follow what they do.
They don't always follow what they do.
So the key here is for people to understand very simply that the consumer welfare standard is for your protection as the consumer in the economy.
There are different kinds of consumers, but that's what your protection is.
By creating economic efficiency, which drives prices and innovation and job creation and wealth creation.
I mean, if you look, Joe Biden, I'm sorry for wandering off again, but Joe Biden issued 72 executive orders last year.
All of government approach to competition.
And he said, and he actually, this is what really riled me, was he named my father.
He said, Judge Bork's experiment failed in antitrust.
Well, that was utter horse hockey.
And, you know, I wrote a piece in the op-ed where I pointed out that the economy has grown three times in size, that there are more small businesses than ever before.
The rate of growth of small businesses was enormous.
He said that was not true.
But Biden and the truth are two things that are not acquainted with each other.
Yeah, they're very distant cousins.
Yes.
And the value of our investments in the stock market has been compounding at roughly 10%.
The consumer welfare standard is not responsible for all of that, but it's part of a free economic system that we have.
And it's about that freedom that makes that possible.
And to tear that down and to now allow Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar and the FTC to basically keelhaul executives if they do something they don't like, just by looking askance at them if they want to merge or, you know, do something like invent a new product that for some reason they don't think is politically correct.
Well, it is.
Well, one of the things that I want to touch on here is really, you sort of brought this out, I'm going to bring it out in the open completely here, is this is the contemporary liberal mindset, and you named off several from Biden and Klobuchar, of course, Warren and others, Khan, FTC. But this, I think it's a big, they've sort of latched on to antitrust in this issue because it was the only place they could go to actually find the teeth.
And this is what I think a lot of people don't realize, is there are true teeth in the antitrust laws.
As you said, it could be a very big club.
It could break up, you know, companies.
And we saw that in the past.
But this goes back to more of their concern of government being involved in the details of private enterprise, not just in antitrust, but we're seeing it in the equality racial standards that they're now implying on companies to report how they do this.
I see this as a concerted effort, and they tried to find the one area where they could actually go with businesses to, frankly, scare them or shut them down.
And this is more about government control over entities than it is actually consumer protection or anything else that they may come up with.
That's exactly what it's about.
It's about uber-regulating the economy.
And interestingly, this ESG movement, which you probably have talked about before, environmental social governance movement, may run afoul of antitrust law, and antitrust could save us from that.
Because there are a number of state attorneys general that are starting investigations into this.
I think ultimately there will be litigation against these banks, these gigantic multi-trillion dollar investment funds that are pushing ESG, and they'll use antitrust to stop it, which is a great thing.
One of the things that very much frustrates me, and I saw it in my time in service in Congress, but also now especially out and reading, is It is amazing to me that the very ones who want to use antitrust, want to use banking regulations, want to use the ESG, all this stuff, are typically coming from people who have never had a stake in the free enterprise system.
They have always lived off of either a government, and look, I'm not saying government workers are bad, but they've never, as the old saying goes, they've always signed the back of the check, never the front of the check.
Does that not frustrate you at times?
I mean, here's Elizabeth Warren, who's been a professor, been everything else, and many of the folks that actually your dad taught at law school, I mean, they're coming up with a side that they've never been on the practical side of this.
I remember down in Georgia, we did banking regulations about 15, 16 years ago during the banking crisis, and they sent down one of their top, quote, regulators and enforcers And was asked under oath, had he ever worked at a bank and made a loan?
And the answer was no.
He had never made a loan at a bank, but yet was over-regulating the entire banking industry at that time.
Is that not just frustrating to you and others who look at this law as it should be and how it's being hijacked?
Yes.
Look, the gap between real-world experience And government experience is enormous.
And those who have never actually had to make a payroll...
And that's, you know, that sounds like one of those lines that politicians use when they're campaigning, but it's true.
I mean, if you haven't actually had to go out and sell something, start a company, have employees, rent space, you know, file for, you know, get a license to do something...
You have no idea what's involved.
But that's not what these folks are.
They're all sort of blue sky thinkers.
What do they call it?
You know, academic thinkers.
And they look at the world through the lens of ideology, not the lens of reality.
Where do you see this going, Bob?
I mean, I'll be frank with you.
I'm concerned.
Because you're having conservatives being brought into this.
You're having liberals, you know, who are pushing it for different reasons.
And you're using things such, as you said, the bias issue, the Section 230 issue, which, I mean, we could spend three hours just on that one.
And I've done it until I'm blue in the face, and it's hard to make people understand.
But where do you see this going and how can we separate it out to where we get back to, you know, as we said, away from this quote, as Orrin Hatt said, the hipster, Mike Lee and I have talked, the hipster antitrust and back to what true, like your dad wrote about, and really, I think, the basis of the law itself.
Well, the answer to everything is voters.
You know, people voting socialists out of office.
Now, you know, and if Amy Klobuchar's bill doesn't pass, we still have Lena Kahn and the Justice Department and the FTC are still going to be trying to make rules and bring cases and block, you know, they will do whatever they can.
They'll litigate rather than legislate, and we'll have two more years of this.
But ultimately...
I don't have great faith in all Republicans, but I think more likely than not, the Republicans will put a stop to this.
And they'll address the issues where they should be addressed.
The free speech issues will be addressed, I think, properly, not with antitrust.
And I think, ultimately, antitrust will hopefully fall back into The system, the regime that has got us this far in the last 43 years.
Exactly.
If people want to find out about your organization, where do they go, Bob?
We have a website called antitrusteducationproject.org.
And on Twitter, we're antitrustedu.
But all you got to do is type my name, which is also my father's name, into Google and the word antitrust.
And a lot of the things we've written, a lot of things he's written, a lot of videos on YouTube and elsewhere.
There's just a lot of material out there.
And welcome anybody to look at it and to reach out to us if they want to talk.
Outstanding.
Folks, you've been listening to Bob Bork.
Bob is the son of legendary Justice Bork.
And we're actually going to have folks, this is going to be a two-parter.
You're going to get to hear more about his father and really what he went through.
But this one is, this episode for me is personal because I've lived a lot of what he's talking about and I saw how it has been moving in Congress.
If you're out there and you're concerned and getting the true facts of what's going on, these organizations like his and listening to this gets us in prepared.
Now, again, there are the biggest thing I found in Washington, D.C. was is most of the time, if you have a problem, there's already a law or there's already something out there that can remedy that.
We don't just need to keep coming up with stuff.
And if you are coming up with it, it's typically for a political ideology or bent.
And that's exactly what we're seeing, which are.
And also Warren and the FTC currently as we go.
But we've got folks like Bob Bork out there fighting that.
Go to the website.
Find out more about it as we go.
And then also be ready because we'll also have another podcast with Bob about his dad and how all this got going.
The famous issue with him in the Supreme Court.
I'd be interested to see how we bring this full around.
But Bob, thanks for being a part of this podcast.
Look forward to this next one.
Thank you very, very much.
Hey everybody, MyPillow, I just wanted to let you know MyPillow is having the biggest sheet sale of the year.
You all have helped build MyPillow into an amazing company that it is today.
And now Mike Lindell, the inventor and CEO, wants to give back exclusively to his listeners.
The Perkow bed sheet set is available in a variety of colors and sizes, and they're all on sale.
For example, the queen size is regularly priced at $89.98, but it is now only $39.98 with our listener promo code.
Order now because when they're gone, they're gone.
You're not going to be able to get it.
These FurCal sheets are breathable.
They have cool, crisp feel.
They come with a 10-year warranty, 60-day money-back guarantee.
Don't miss out on this incredible offer.
There's a limited supply, so be sure to order now.
Call 1-800- 800-986-3994.
Use the promo code Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S. Or you can go to MyPillow.com, click on the radio listener square, and use the promo code Collins, C-O-L-L-I-N-S. Lisa and I sleep on these sheets every night.
You will want to have them as well.
They're a wonderful product.
Go right now, either 800-986-3994, code word Collins, or go to MyPillow.com.
Also use the code word Collins to get this discount.