When private power outgrows its check

According to Fox News, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has declared that Congress should consider breaking up companies like Apple, citing rising prices linked to AI chip supply chain strain. I will not adjudicate the politics of who said it or under which banner it was said. I am interested in the argument itself — because it is an argument that goes to the very heart of what a national commerce power is for.

I spent the better part of my tenure as Secretary of the Treasury arguing that the federal government must be vigorous enough to shape commercial life — to encourage manufactures, to establish credit, to build the institutional sinews a young republic needed to compete with older powers. I did not argue for government power as an end in itself. I argued for it as a check: a counterweight against the kind of concentrated private dominance that, left unchecked, substitutes a private will for the public one. The Bank I championed was not meant to be a monster; it was meant to prevent monsters.

The AI chip supply chain, as I understand it by inference from the reporting, is not merely a commercial convenience. It is the productive foundation on which American industry — and national security — will increasingly rest. When one or two companies command that foundation, and when their pricing decisions flow from that command rather than from open competition, the republic has a legitimate interest. This is not socialism. This is the plain logic of the commerce power, which I always read broadly: broadly enough to make a national market, broadly enough to prevent a private party from becoming the market.

I will speak with the humility the situation requires on the precise engineering of semiconductor supply chains — I could not have known them, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I know this much: a nation that cedes control of its industrial base to a handful of private actors, however talented, is a nation that has traded its productive independence for convenience. My Report on the Subject of Manufactures made exactly this case, against those who said government had no business encouraging industry. The fashionable objection changes with the century; the underlying error does not.

Here is my recommendation, stated plainly. Congress should neither panic nor shrug. It should conduct rigorous investigation — under the commerce power, under antitrust authority — into whether the concentration of AI chip supply and the devices built upon it has risen to the level where it distorts market entry, raises prices without competitive discipline, and creates dependencies that a foreign adversary could exploit. If the answer is yes on any of those counts, the remedy is not to destroy a great enterprise but to regulate it as the public utility it has effectively become, or to restore the competitive conditions that make regulation unnecessary. Inaction is not neutrality. In commerce as in government, a feeble hand is not a clean hand.