The Obama administration has worked for increased competition in the healthcare, financial, and energy sectors, the three major markets on the legislative agenda. Conservatives are labeling the president "antibusiness." But years of deregulatory policy in these markets have led to market failure, and it’s the White House and Congress that are acting to make sure these markets keep functioning for consumers and businesses alike.
As Christian Weller argues at the Center for American Progress, there’s nothing too complicated about why regulation is necessary to protect markets:
Health insurance premiums and denied claims, high financial service fees, too much speculation and too few small business loans, gouging at the pump and oil dependence (and now, a Gulf Coast disaster), are the real world reflections of dry, standard textbook economic problems.
Markets work efficiently when consumers have full information about their options and when there is fair competition on the supply side. Health care reform will improve both by creating state-run insurance exchanges that provide a marketplace in which information about different plans flows easily and in which the companies that deliver what consumers need will win. The administration did not insist that the government serve as a provider of health insurance. If it had, there might have been a shred of substance to the conservative argument that the president is pursuing an antibusiness agenda.
Financial regulatory reform operates on the same principles, making sure consumers and investors have full information about the products banks are selling them, which will prevent market distortions. And energy legislation under consideration could encourage start-up companies to enter the market and compete with international oil giants. New policies could also prevent oil companies from shifting the costs of environmental damage onto consumers, as happened when BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded in April. BP profited hugely from its drilling operations while everyone else faced the risk of a disaster.
These policies are all designed to protect markets. Why let the facts that Obama is actually pro-market stand in the way of an otherwise appealing fiction?