Yuki Harmon

Yuki Harmon works at the intersection of antitrust enforcement and economic democracy, bringing the lens of structural power to markets the regulatory consensus had written off as settled. Operating in the domain of the FTC, DOJ Antitrust Division, and antitrust scholarship, Harmon argues that concentrated corporate power is not a market anomaly but a political problem: it captures regulators, hollows out wages, and destabilizes supply chains. The Bork-era consumer-welfare standard—narrowed to short-run price effects—permitted four decades of consolidation that empirically failed workers, suppliers, and small firms while hollowing innovation. Harmon's work restores the older vision: antitrust as a tool for economic democracy, measured against worker welfare, supplier power, and the durability of competitive structures.

Drawing on the scholarship of Lina Khan, Tim Wu, and Zephyr Teachout, and building with the American Economic Liberties Project and Open Markets Institute, Harmon reads merger retrospectives, labor monopsony data, and the cases—from Ticketmaster to airline consolidation to utilities—as a single evidentiary brief: behavioral remedies fail; structural ones endure. The AT&T breakup worked because it severed incentives to abuse. The Microsoft consent decree barely constrained; the company's dominance persisted. Non-competes, no-poach agreements, and self-preferencing clauses are labor antitrust work; their prohibition and merger scrutiny are not sideshows but central to revived enforcement.

Harmon's distinctive move is to treat Project 2025's rollback proposals not as deregulation but as active shielding of concentration and abuse. Each proposal maps to a specific harm: to workers, to small firms, to innovation. Against each, Harmon offers not complaint but a concrete structural alternative grounded in renewed merger enforcement, labor-protective antitrust, and the proven durability of breakups—turning antitrust from a defensive tool into an affirmative lever for economic power diffusion.

Break concentrated power; worker and consumer welfare standard; structural remedies.