The conservative movement spent forty years dismantling every institution that kept a local merchant alive, and now its answer is another bill out of Washington. Mike Davis, writing in Fox News, calls Amazon a tollbooth that skims nearly half of every independent seller’s dollar, inflates prices across the whole internet, and buries American businesses under a flood of unchecked overseas goods. He wants Congress to pass the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the Open App Markets Act, and the AMERICA Act to break the gatekeepers’ grip on the digital marketplace. He is right about the racket. He is right about the toll. He is wrong about almost everything else, because he will not ask what built the tollbooth in the first place, and the answer is the movement he speaks for.

I will grant Davis his strongest point, because it is strong. The numbers he cites—45 to 50 cents of every dollar a seller earns, extracted in listing fees, advertising fees, fulfillment fees, and penalties for offering a lower price elsewhere—describe a gatekeeper whose power is absolute and whose cut is a private tax. When the gatekeeper can bury a merchant who dares to charge less on her own website, the price you see is not a market price; it is the price the gatekeeper has set for the whole internet. A shopkeeper in Zanesville who tries to sell on her own domain will find her Amazon listing throttled into oblivion, and she will pay the toll or starve. Davis is also right that Amazon is not a neutral marketplace but a platform with an agenda—the same company that pulls books when its masters in San Francisco object to their content. The observation is correct. The tollbooth is real. Davis would break it with three federal statutes; he wants competition restored by force of law, and the impulse is not unserious.

But the man calling for the tollbooth’s demolition wants you to forget that he spent his whole career building its foundation. Mike Davis is the founder and president of the Article III Project, an organization that exists to confirm judges whose jurisprudence makes a machine like Amazon structurally inevitable. The same legal and economic orthodoxy—the consumer-welfare antitrust standard that declared the only admissible evidence of monopoly harm is a line on a receipt, the free-trade gospel that treated every tariff as a tax on freedom, and the First Amendment doctrine that treats a platform’s editorial decisions as private speech beyond the reach of the laws it now begs Congress to pass—did the same work. It read the Sherman Act as a guarantee of low prices, not a protection of the hardware store that employed your neighbor. It celebrated the global supply chain that let a factory in Shenzhen undercut the family shop on Main Street, because the spreadsheet showed the consumer saving a nickel, and the spreadsheet did not show the paper mill idling in Wisconsin Rapids in 2020, a thousand jobs gone, the property tax base evaporating, the town losing the only employer that paid a living wage. It defended Amazon’s right to pull a book from its virtual shelves as an exercise of corporate speech, of private liberty, and then it looked at the wreckage and called it a tollbooth it had just discovered. The same movement that told us every morning that the administrative state cannot be trusted to manage anything is now telling us, after lunch, that the same government will neutrally, fairly, and forever restrain the most powerful corporations in human history without ever once tilting the field in a direction the donors dislike.

The real answer does not come from the Senate Judiciary Committee. I have spent my life managing a farm cooperative in a county that the global economy left behind. I know what it costs to ship a bushel, and I know what a gatekeeper takes. The answer to the tollbooth is not a different tollbooth run by a different master in a different city. The answer is to build a marketplace the tollbooth cannot reach.

It is harder, and it is the only thing that works. The Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative does not answer to a distant shareholder because it is owned by the thirty-one thousand families who use the power. The credit union on Main Street does not scalp your deposit because it is owned by the depositors, and the depositors live in the county. The farm co-op sets the price of milk in a room full of farmers who will go home to the same sandy soil and the same mortgage. When a community owns the marketplace—when the bookstore is a co-op, when the hardware store is a worker-owned enterprise, when the online storefront is a mutual governed by the independent merchants who list their goods there—the tollbooth has nothing to tax, because the gate is held in common. Widely distributed property, locally governed, is the only bulwark against a rentier who answers to no one within a day’s drive.

The cooperative is harder. It demands men who will sit in a drafty parish hall and argue with their neighbors, who will accept a thinner dividend in exchange for keeping the gate open and the community intact. But a town that still has a co-op, a credit union, a strong parish, a VFW hall whose members know each other’s children, a Main Street where the shopkeeper recognizes your face—that town has less empty space for a tollbooth to fill. Davis is right that the tollbooth is a racket. But the racket was built by the very ideology that now offers a federal cure, and the cure, even if it works, will only hand the tollbooth’s keys to a different set of distant masters. The real counter-model is standing in the county seat, answering to its members in a room with folding chairs and a public ledger. It is small. It is boring. It is not an app. And it is the only thing the tollbooth has never learned to digest.