Essay
hello chair and committee members. My name is Ayden Moore and I’m presenting bill HF0034 A bill for an act relating to Fair Competition Act established, monopsony power regulated, price increases prohibited, price discrimination prohibited, enforcement authority provided, and civil and criminal penalties modified and established.
With ever increasing prices on all goods, whether its needed or simply something you want, prices are going up, and we all see this in our daily lives. This bill aims to curb that, through cracking down on monopsony power, increasing fines for violating Minnesota’s antitrust laws, new consumer protections, and modifying the statue of limitations.
To address a counterpart to monopolies that remains largely unrecognized, this bill has protections against Monopsonies, which is a market with only one major buyer or very few major buyers who are able to use that power to affect prices of goods sold to them. This can drastically affect Minnesota's agricultural industry, as some of the products we grow here are bought by very few buyers which can force our local farmers to have to lower prices, decreasing their revenue. By stopping this, we can improve the lives of not only our farmers, but other sectors of Minnesotan industry.
Traditionally, quite a few antitrust offenses such as price-fixing, bid-rigging, market allocation and many others require proof of a agreement between two parties. But this bill also intends to modify that, making it so these offenses can be committed by only a single party, making it easier for us to prosecute ‘conspiracy’ based charges without there being multiple parties involved.
A very important part of this bill is the increase in penalties for these types of crimes, whereas the maximum penalty for Civil penalties and criminal penalties used to be 50,000$ (and/or five years in jail in the case of criminal penalties) is now respectively increase to 100,000$ per violation for a individual, up to 5 million dollars for a corporation per violation (based on annual revenue) and for criminal penalties, fines up to the actual damages caused and/or 7 years in prison.
The modification to the statue of limitations of limitations is quite simple, you used to be able to only make lawsuits against companies breaking anti-trust laws 4 years after the violation started… but now, it changes this 4 year rule to four years after its discovery, stopping companies from getting away with breaking the law simply because the crime happened too long ago.
This bill also provides numerous protections for consumers, such as disallowing unconscionably excessive prices for services or goods, discriminating in prices or quality of goods to hamper competition, similar to the federal Robinson-Patman act.
In quick summary, this bill will not only stop corporations from violating various anti-trust laws, but it will increase penalties for it, along with that it will protect consumers and help stop the raising of prices prices we see around us.