Monopoly Round-up: Voters Just Demanded an End to the Number Go Up Economy

A lot of monopoly-related news, as usual. The Senate agreed to fund the government as long as no one touches health care corruption, the Supreme Court is likely to strip Trump of a key part of his tariff authority, and Disney and Google feud over which monopolist gets to control sports programming. Also, Lina Khan content now goes way more viral than that of Barack Obama.

But this week, the most important story are the results of the elections Tuesday, which I suspect reflect a deep dissatisfaction not just with Trump, but with American economic strategy since the mid-2000s. Here’s pollster G. Elliot Morris describing the key dynamic: “Among voters who said the economy was their top issue, partisan trust on the economy moved 93 points toward Democrats between 2024 and this year’s New Jersey and Virginia elections.” In addition, this week, Trump’s disapproval collapsed, moving from an average of negative 7.5% for most of his first year to negative 13% just this week.

These shifts, while large, make sense, and actually track what happened to Joe Biden. Indeed, Trump’s politics in some ways mirror those of Biden. For instance, during the Biden era, Democrats obsessed over niche identity questions and ignored the real economy, throwing a few crumbs towards an industrial policy, which is to say subsidies for chips, batteries, and solar panels, and a bit of antitrust. Wall Street and big tech did very well, and prices were high. The result was that Republicans over-performed.

This time, it’s Republicans obsessing over niche identity questions and ignoring the real economy, while throwing slightly different crumbs towards an industrial policy, which is to say tariffs plus subsidies for chips and critical minerals. Wall Street and big tech are doing very well, and prices are high. This time, the Democrats over-performed.

Taking a step back, voters have chosen change over incumbents in virtually every election since 2006. And it’s not a coincidence that this ‘throw the bums out’ era was organized around a particularly financier-friendly form of statecraft, one based on the government fostering excessively high returns on capital. The methods were monopolization, a low labor share of income, private equity extraction, and Wall Street-led growth through bubbles in subprime housing or data center build-outs.

Of course, Donald Trump’s economic strategy is not just straight continuity with what came before, so it’s important to look at specifically what he did, ...