Mark Leddy, antitrust and everyday life
Competition has the power to shape a country's economy. We discussed this topic with Mark Leddy, guest on Telos A&S's streaming session 'The Power of Antitrust', for the series Shall We Call Power Odd and Scary Beast?, designed to launch the collection TWO, the volume featuring a selection of interviews by PRIMOPIANOSCALAc.
Here you will find the video with 'the best of'.
Leddy is a lawyer specialising in competition issues. In his long career, he has found himself on both sides of the fence, prosecuting and defending cartels, mergers and acquisitions, and dominant companies, both as a prosecutor and as a defence lawyer.
To help us understand the relevance of antitrust measures in our daily lives, Mark Leddy asks a simple question: Do we still want to be able to say "Hello, Doctor So-and-so" to the pharmacist next door, or do we prefer to buy our medicines, and the thousands of other products available in pharmacies, from a large chain, saving our money and finding greater variety? According to Leddy, it is the consumer who should decide and not the pharmacists' 'union' or their lobby.
This is competition explained in a nutshell and the basis of capitalism. According to Leddy, capitalist Countries have many problems to solve, but they have shaped their economies to provide better conditions for their citizens than centrally planned economies. And the result is evident both from a material and social point of view: lower prices, more innovation, but also better education and so on.
The problem Leddy himself addresses, despite being a vigorous advocate of market economies, is how to reconcile social justice and the rules of competition. That is, how to balance a good level of health care and the universality of care, full employment and the supply of affordable products, environmental quality and production. These are the answers that politics must provide.
SocialTelos