While driving around in our latest blizzard just now to secure much-needed cat food before our male pet shuts down my computer, I heard a Republican congressman tell NPR that he voted with most of his colleagues earlier today to repeal the insurance industry's antitrust exemption because it would have no effect.

Now there's a solid rationale for enacting legislation.

But leave aside the politics for a moment. Is it really true that repeal of the McCarran-Ferguson Act for health-care insurance companies would have no effect on premiums?

The AP dutifully reports that "most experts" believe that that would be the case, without citing one, as if the conventional wisdom is never wrong and therefore doesn't require an actual expert to vouch for it, because states have the power to regulate rates, and that has had no effect.

Excuse me, but I don't see the connection here between the exemption and the ability of states to regulate rates. And even if there was one, the argument that antitrust laws assumes one of two things: That the anti-trust laws wouldn't be enforced, or are always ineffective even if they are.

And that is just not the case.

As Albert Foer, president of the Aemrican Antitrust Institute put it in an email to me just now: "The states had very limited antitrust resources and the state oversight of insurance generally has not been famous for its independence or aggressiveness." 

Ever hear of Teddy Roosevelt, guys? Guess what, he was a Republican, at least for a while.

Come to think of it, he and his fellow trust busters went after the banks as well as oil companies back in the day.

And before antitrust opponents start throwing around charges that proponents are just engaged in appeasing "populist" anger, they should ask themselves why, if they profess to believe in free markets, don't they believe in competition? Because that's what antitrust laws are expressly designed to promote. And unless I'm mistaken, they do work as advertised, if they're enforced.

Again, here's Foer: "Underforcement of antitrust has been a problem for the past thirty years, ever since the antitrust agencies were cut way back in their budgets and personnel and the courts became packed with judges who do not look on antitrust with favor. The attitude of the courts will continue to be an obstacle for strong enforcement."

Yes, I'm aware of the academic debates about the cost/benefit trade-offs here, but the arguments of most antitrust critics seem to me to be theoretically based and politically biased. Yes, too, monopolies may erode without intervention in the long term, but as Keynes more or less said, in the long term we're all dead.

In the end, I suppose, there's no getting around the politics here after all.