Should Walmart and Target have been allowed to block Amazon from starting?
If they could have, they would have.
But thanks to antitrust law, it is illegal to collude to block new competitors.
Monopolies and duopolies are prohibited for good reason: Less competition invariably leads not only to higher prices but also to less innovation, fewer choices and lower quality products and services.
The same principle applies in politics, and the brokenness of our political system proves it.
For the better part of two centuries, the Republican and Democratic parties have maintained a duopoly over politics and government.
They currently control 99.96% of elected offices.
They work together to block potential competitors — third parties and independents — from entering elections.
Look no farther than their efforts to stop the group No Labels, which is working to gain ballot access for a potential independent unity ticket in the 2024 presidential election.
The parties are coming after No Labels with the classic monopolistic playbook: collusion, corruption and coercion.
Take collusion first: In June, news broke that Democratic elites, “including current advisers to President [Joe] Biden and former U.S. senators,” held a shadowy backroom meeting with anti-Trump Republicans about how to stop No Labels.
In other words, two parties that can barely meet to keep our government funded are quick to get together when there is a threat to their shared power.
Their charge against No Labels is that its centrist unity ticket would pull more votes from Biden than Trump, thus helping Trump win.
Except they have no proof.
They cite Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016 as examples of third-party candidates that “spoiled” elections, but neither candidate received more than 2% of the vote.
No Labels is already polling around 20%, more comparable to Ross Perot, who got 19% and helped Bill Clinton win.
The parties are sowing fear about a second Trump presidency to scare people, when in reality they are nervous because almost half of voters say they would consider a third party in 2024, more than enough to make No Labels not a spoiler, but a victor.
To save themselves from this pesky competitor, the two parties are also wielding corruption.
Like the mobsters that bribe police to go after a rival, the parties are putting pressure on secretaries of state to “investigate” No Labels and challenge its right to be on the ballot.
This reveals a fundamental injustice behind the two-party duopoly: These organizations have control over government, the only institution with the power to bust them up.
Finally, in addition to collusion and corruption, the parties are wielding coercion against No Labels.
They’re mounting pressure campaigns in the media and in the courts, filing lawsuits, seeking to dox, shame and intimidate No Labels donors.
They’re also reportedly calling No Labels staffers and threatening that they’ll never work in politics again if they don’t resign immediately.
In all these ways, the Republican and Democratic parties are monopolistic players.
If government regulators were at all honest, they’d bust the parties up.
Of course, it might be hard to win a case based on antitrust law, which usually applies to businesses.
But government would never go after the political parties for another obvious reason — it’s controlled by them.
So it is up to citizen groups and voters to expose the toxic duopoly that controls our politics and government.
Doing so is the best way to save the political system from itself.
Competition is good for any system.
It benefits consumers and the economy by lowering prices, driving innovation and improving quality.
If Walmart and Target had blocked Amazon, not only would we not have Amazon, but we likely wouldn’t have online shopping at all.
Brick-and-mortar retailers would have never been forced to innovate to survive in this new paradigm that Amazon created.
If our politics and our government feel broken today, it’s because they are.
They’ve been devoid of true competition, innovation and quality for decades thanks to the duopoly that controls them.
In this system, the two parties don’t have to solve problems to win votes.
They don’t have to persuade the middle.
They are rewarded by stoking division and leaving problems to fester.
No Labels wants to change that by forcing the parties to compete for the centrist majority.
To do so, it’ll have to defeat not only the two parties individually, but the two-party system — which has the power of the government behind it.
Philip Levine, a cruise-industry entrepreneur, is a former two-term mayor of Miami Beach and onetime Democratic candidate for governor of Florida.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
