The most bothering aspect is that governments always hide behind a curtain of plausible deniability: "well you can't accuse us of not possessing a crystal ball to predict the future", except governments don't need crystal balls depicting the future.

Image companies A & B wish to merge for example, and claim lowered future consumer prices as a result of the merger. A government can shape this as a bet: proportional to your excess-price-over-prediction is positive, a government can institute a misprediction tax proportional to such excess. This places the prediction effort correctly with the companies instead of the government (if you believe governments were intrinsically better at predicting than companies, you'd be a communist).

Yes! Absolutely! If merging business were confident in their price reduction tall tales they would be willing to bet on them. Unfortunately, both the corporations who abuse the policy and the politicians who put it in place understand perfectly well what they are doing. Structuring the deal in a manner that would avoid corruption would defeat the purpose of doing corruption.

Re: crystal ball, a biography of Louis Brandeis would suffice. It turns out we had this exact same problem with the Robber Barons. The arguments were the same, the talking points were the same (they didn't even update the story about Standard Oil lol), time is a flat circle when it comes to American antitrust. In any case, the Robber Barons were defeated in the early 20th century and Reagan was just bringing back the policy that served them well using the excuses that served them well. He was not inventing something brave and new that might reasonably have been expected to behave differently. Reagan and Bork knew exactly what they were doing.