It’s Unclear What Kamala Harris Thinks About Corporate Power. But the Signs Are Worrisome.

What does Kamala Harris think about corporate power?

This is an important question to ask about any presidential candidate, but it’s especially relevant in Ms. Harris’s case. After all, she is a high-ranking member of the Biden administration, which has sought to combat corporate power — in the form of monopolies, unfair competitive practices and price fixing — with a vigor that we hadn’t seen in decades.

Over the past three and a half years, the administration has sued four enormous corporations on allegations that they have engaged in unfair competition: Apple, Meta, Amazon and Google. On Monday, in a major victory for the administration, the judge in another Google antitrust case ruled that the company is an illegal monopolist. The administration has sought to stop price-fixing and consolidation in the meat, real estate and supermarket industries, and to eliminate junk fees on credit cards and bank accounts. The chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, is seeking to block private equity financiers from consolidating health care providers. The administration is even suing to break up Ticketmaster’s owner.

Behind all these efforts is a vision of commerce: that conducting business means making or doing something useful for a profit, not extracting cash using coercion; that focusing on a high stock price over productivity may lead to disasters like Boeing’s safety crisis; that innovation and entrepreneurship should be prioritized over finance. It’s also a view of how to preserve political freedom: Corporate power must be checked by competition.

At the moment we don’t know if Ms. Harris shares this vision. Addressing corporate power was not a big part of what she did as the attorney general of California, as a U.S. senator or as vice president. And as a candidate, while she has mentioned price gouging, medical debt and corporate landlords, she has not laid out a full policy agenda.

Some signs, however, are worrisome.

It’s often said in politics that “personnel is policy,” so consider the people around her. One of Ms. Harris’s closest advisers is her brother-in-law Tony West, who is taking a leave from his job as the chief legal officer of Uber to help with her presidential campaign. Mr. West, a high-level Justice Department official in the Obama administration, is reportedly bringing in a host of campaign officials. The team now includes former corporate advisers. David Plouffe, who worked for Uber and advised TikTok and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, has also joined the team.

During the Obama administration, Mr. West had a leading role in the flawed response to the financial crisis. The commercial strategies of his current employer, Uber, are based in part on controlling markets and undercutting labor standards.

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