"The last refuge of a vacant liberal mind:" thinking that antitrust can cure inflation

 NYT (12/23):  

As rising inflation threatens his presidency, President Biden is turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases that his administration believes are partly driven by a lack of corporate competition.

On Christmas 2021, the headline in the NY Times business section was "As Prices Rise, Biden Turns to Antitrust Enforcers."  Larry Summers immediately bashed the idea:

“The emerging claim that antitrust can combat inflation reflects ‘science denial,’ ” tweeted Harvard economist Lawrence Summers, a senior official in the Obama and Clinton administrations. “There are many areas like transitory inflation where serious economists differ. Antitrust as an anti-inflation strategy is not one of them.”

In the late 1970's, at Stanford, I heard John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist in charge of price controls during WWII, call the idea "the last refuge of a vacant liberal mind."  The turn of phrase was so elegant and shocking--at the time, I was a liberal--that it has stayed with me.