Antitrust Law Quotes

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am.

During one hearing, Senator Ted Cruz pointed out that Twitter and Facebook now have power that is much greater than that of any other company that has ever existed in the United States, and that’s including the ones that have been broken up by antitrust laws. According to the rules of the free market, you need to have competition. Otherwise, the company that controls the whole thing becomes lazy, corrupt, or worse. This is what is happening right now with big tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google. Because they’re so big and because they’re almost 100 percent liberal, they have the power to tilt the national conversation to the left and literally block the voices on the right.

The tale of America coming out of the Great Depression and not only surviving but actually transforming itself into an economic giant is the stuff of legend. But the part that gives me goose bumps is what we did with all that wealth: over several generations, our country built the greatest middle class the world had ever known. We built it ourselves, using our own hard work and the tools of government to open up more opportunities for millions of people. We used it all—tax policy, investments in public education, new infrastructure, support for research, rules that protected consumers and investors, antitrust laws—to promote and expand our middle class. The spectacular, shoot-off-the-fireworks fact is that we succeeded.

President Theodore Roosevelt had created the bureau in 1908, hoping to fill the void in federal law enforcement. (Because of lingering opposition to a national police force, Roosevelt’s attorney general had acted without legislative approval, leading one congressman to label the new organization a “bureaucratic bastard.”) When White entered the bureau, it still had only a few hundred agents and only a smattering of field offices. Its jurisdiction over crimes was limited, and agents handled a hodgepodge of cases: they investigated antitrust and banking violations; the interstate shipment of stolen cars, contraceptives, prizefighting films, and smutty books; escapes by federal prisoners; and crimes committed on Indian reservations.

In the late 1800s a certain man taught Sunday school for over 20 years in a Baptist church; he eventually became the wealthiest man in the world. He also did not pay tithes. He was not generous toward anyone, quite the opposite, he was the reason that journalists came up with the term, "Robber Baron." The man was John D. Rockefeller. He engaged in ruthless and illegal business practices and built an oil company called Standard Oil that was so large that, when it was broken up by antitrust laws, several major oil companies were created from that one company. Over one hundred years ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth over one billion dollars, which would be 50 to 100 billion dollars in today’s money. If he did pay tithes it would have meant an income of 100 million dollars (5 to 10 billion today) to his local church. It was not God that "blessed" him with great wealth; it was Satan, the god of greed. God does not lead people to engage in ruthless and illegal business practices in a desire for more, more, more. Even in his old age, he displayed his greed by giving away dimes. He always had dimes in his pocket so he could generously give one to people he met! What lessons are we to learn from this? One very important thing is that very often Satan will give people lots of money because Satan knows that money is very deceitful and can make even the most devout Christian materialistic and greedy. Let's take a look at another example. There is today a man who planned to become a missionary when he was young, but he not only turned against his calling, he turned against Christianity. Do you suppose that God has blessed this man? He is today a multi-billionaire, media-mogul. The man is Ted Turner, who started CNN and is a partner in Time-Warner and other media companies. Can we use him as an example that God blesses a righteous man? No, actually, the opposite is most likely true, that Satan prospers those who turn from the straight way.

The cartoonist Jules Feiffer, contemplating the communication problem in a nonindustrial context, has said, “Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?” Suppose, purely as a hypothesis, that the owner of a company who orders his subordinates to obey the antitrust laws has such poor communication with himself that he does not really know whether he wants the order to be complied with or not. If his order is disobeyed, the resulting price-fixing may benefit his company’s coffers; if it is obeyed, then he has done the right thing. In the first instance, he is not personally implicated in any wrongdoing, while in the second he is positively involved in right doing. What, after all, can he lose? It is perhaps reasonable to suppose that such an executive might communicate his uncertainty more forcefully than his order. Possibly yet another foundation grantee should have a look at the reverse of communication failure, where he might discover that messages the sender does not even realize he is sending sometimes turn out to have got across only too effectively.

A new green economy can easily suffer from the same predatory form of capitalism that created the global economic meltdown. As Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers notes, "The world is suffering from the perverse incentives of 'unnatural capitalism.' When people say 'free market,' I ask if free is a verb. We don't ave a free market but a highly managed and often monopolized market. We used to have somewhat effective antitrust laws in the United States. Now we have banks and companies that are 'too big to fail,' but in truth are too big not to fail. The resulting extremes of concentration of wealth and political power are very bad for business and the economy (not to mention the environment, human rights, and democracy). One result is that small companies can't advance too far against the big players with their legions of lawyers and Capitol Hill lobbyists, when in truth it's small and medium-sized companies that provide the majority of jobs as well as innovation.

The justification for the antitrust laws that would ultimately break up Standard Oil is that monopoly prevented competition. Preventing competition was bad because the monopoly could charge outrageous prices. Well, every single big company in American history that had gotten big through the free market rather than legislative largesse, got that way by keeping prices low and quality high. If it were to stay that way, assuming no helping hand from the legislature, it would have to keep prices low, quality and service high.

Why don’t we pass a law that says when you borrow money to buy somebody else and cannibalize him, the interest payments on those loans are not deductible? That would get the excesses out of the system pretty fast. Right now, if you want to buy up a competitor, generally you can’t. That would violate the antitrust laws. But if you want to buy a company that does something else entirely, that’s okay. Where’s the sense in that?

The story of American history that most students have encountered for at least the past several decades amounts to a series of drearily predictable clichés: the Civil War was all about slavery, antitrust law saved us from wicked big business, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression, and so on. From the colonial settlements through the presidency of Bill Clinton, this book, in its brief compass, aims to set the record straight.

The [antitrust] law in the United States is couched in vague, indefinable terms, permitting the Administration and the courts to omit defining in advance what is a "monopolistic" crime and what is not. Whereas Anglo-Saxon law has rested on a structure of clear definitions of crime, known in advance and discoverable by a jury after due legal process, the antitrust laws thrive on deliberate vagueness and ex post facto rulings. No businessman knows when he has committed a crime and when he has not, and he will never know until the government, perhaps after another shift in its own criteria of crime, swoops down upon him and prosecutes.

AI will bring that same monopolistic tendency to dozens of industries, eroding the competitive mechanisms of markets in the process. We could see the rapid emergence of a new corporate oligarchy, a class of AI-powered industry champions whose data edge over the competition feeds on itself until they are entirely untouchable. American antitrust laws are often difficult to enforce in this situation, because of the requirement in U.S. law that plaintiffs prove the monopoly is actually harming consumers. AI monopolists, by contrast, would likely be delivering better and better services at cheaper prices to consumers, a move made possible by the incredible productivity and efficiency gains of the technology.

Mindshare dominance is, in other words, a really odd sort of beast, something that the framers of our antitrust laws couldn’t possibly have imagined. It looks like one of these modern, wacky chaos-theory phenomena, a complexity thing, in which a whole lot of independent but connected entities (the world’s computer users), making decisions on their own, according to a few simple rules of thumb, generate a large phenomenon (total domination of the market by one company) that cannot be made sense of through any kind of rational analysis. Such phenomena are fraught with concealed tipping-points and all a-tangle with bizarre feedback loops, and cannot be understood; people who try, end up going crazy, forming crackpot theories, or becoming high-paid chaos-theory consultants.

Yet the most powerful argument in favor of antitrust law is one that is rarely made: antitrust law reduces the political power of firms.

As Ivar traveled downtown to the Wall Street offices of Lee Higginson, he shifted gears. His pitch to Durant wouldn’t be an American monopoly – that venture clearly had floundered. He certainly wouldn’t mention film. Instead, Ivar would dangle a new idea before Durant: the prospect of Americans investing in foreign monopolies. Antitrust laws prohibited a match monopoly in the United States, but nothing prevented American investors from buying into monopolies abroad. Ivar’s match monopoly in Sweden was a highly profitable model. It could be just the beginning. Ivar recalled the extraordinary scheme orchestrated during the seventeenth century by Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, who had formed the South Sea Company to assume England’s national debt. The scheme had become known as the South Sea Bubble, for the sharp increase in the price of South Sea Company shares. In exchange for the South Sea Company assuming its debt, the British government had given the company a monopoly on trade to the South Seas. The deal helped keep England solvent, and led to a boom in the business and share price of the company. It was an audacious deal, but a simple idea. And the idea could be replicated; it wasn’t limited to England and the South Seas or to a time two hundred years earlier. In theory, if a government needed money and a company wanted a monopoly, both sides could benefit from a similar compact – anytime, anywhere, with any product.

Like a French Revolution in reverse—one in which the sansculottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy—the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, farther to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing economic nostrums from history’s dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4 As

Procedural Posture Appellant challenged the orders of the Superior Court of San Diego County (California) directing indemnification of respondent for his expenses incurred in defense of a cross-complaint in the underlying litigation between appellant and appellant's franchisee and in his proceedings seeking indemnification for attorneys' fees and costs under Cal. Corp. Code § 317. California Business Lawyer & Corporate Lawyer, Inc. is a Civil Attorney Orange County Overview Appellant's franchisee sued appellant, respondent and others, for, among other things, an antitrust claim on behalf of all of appellant's franchisees. Respondent was later dismissed as appellant's president and chief executive officer and filed a lawsuit for breach of his employment contract. Following a judgment favorable to respondent in his employment contract suit, appellant filed suit seeking a declaratory judgment that it did not have to indemnify respondent in the litigation with its franchisee. The trial court found that respondent acted in good faith and in a manner he reasonably believed to be in the best interests of appellant, and thus he should be indemnified by appellant pursuant to Cal. Corp. Code § 317. The trial court also awarded respondent attorneys' fees and costs incurred as a result of litigation. On appeal, the court affirmed. There was no factual finding in appellant's franchisee's suit that appellant, under respondent, had engaged in illegal practices. Substantial evidence supported the trial court's finding of respondent's good faith. Also, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in its determination and award of attorneys' fees. Outcome The court affirmed the orders of the trial court because substantial evidence supported the trial court's finding that because respondent acted in good faith and in a manner he reasonably believed to be in appellant's best interest, he was entitled to indemnification from appellant. Also, the trial court did not abuse its discretion by awarding respondent attorneys' fees and costs.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent.

Unions, as we have seen, pushed for and won legislation that legitimized collective bargaining. Small farmers got federal price supports and a voice in setting agricultural policy. Farm cooperatives, like unions, won exemption from federal antitrust laws. Small retailers obtained protection against retail chains through state “fair trade” laws and the federal Robinson-Patman Act, requiring wholesalers to charge all retailers the same price regardless of size and preventing chains from cutting prices.

In this era before railroad regulation and antitrust legislation, the SIC contract didn’t violate any obvious laws, only a universal sense of fair play.

Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson’s estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt’s antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.4

It takes a kind of hallucinatory bravado to call yourself a populist while cracking down on workers and ignoring antitrust laws, which the Reagan administration and its successors did. It’s like a banker calling himself a freedom fighter because he likes Basque cuisine. It’s like a slumlord signing his eviction notices, “Yours in solidarity.

America’s laws have not been updated to track the changes in America’s monopoly landscape. Our Congress refuses to do it. Our enforcement tools are getting rusty. Our competition enforcers don’t have enough resources to effectively take on multibillion-dollar, much less trillion-dollar, companies. And America’s courts are increasingly populated by conservative judges, including on the U.S. Supreme Court, who interpret the antitrust laws so narrowly that their decisions have created a dampening effect on the ability of the government and private plaintiffs to litigate antitrust claims.

Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.

Today’s Big Tech barons have benefited from lax antitrust enforcement and outdated antitrust laws, from cozy relationships with supposed regulators, and from special protections in the law. All this must end.

official U.S. policy in the spring of 1945 favored strict measures to remove ideologically committed Nazis and their diehard supporters from positions of influence; a limited economic reform similar to U.S. antitrust measures intended to break up German cartels; and preservation of a competitive, private-enterprise economy.

No one seems to think the meatpackers are dumb enough to have an actual sit-down meeting to divvy up territories where they won’t compete against each other. But then again, they don’t have to. With only two or three buyers in the market, each buyer can easily see where the other is active. Stable buying arrangements can solidify over time without any meatpacker engaging in the kind of explicit deal making that is illegal under U.S. antitrust law. In the case of Winter Feed Yard, it might make sense that Cargill buys a majority of the cattle. The plant is located next door. But National Beef is just a negligible two miles down the road. Yet Winter says National Beef has not sent a buyer to his feed yard in about two years.

But in 1933 he was a towering figure who was supposed to have discovered something worth study and imitation by all world artificers everywhere. Such eminent persons as Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler6 and Mr. Sol Bloom,7 head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House, assured us he was a great man and had something we might well look into for imitation. What they liked particularly was his corporative system. He organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the same thing. These code authorities could regulate production, quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to combine.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, the Supreme Court’s newest member, wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the union had pursued peaceful, legal means to a legitimate end; that miners who joined the union had no intention to injure their employer’s business; and finally that the UMWA could not be judged an illegal organization under an antitrust law Congress had aimed at monopoly corporations. In Brandeis’s view, the court’s majority naively assumed that Hitchman’s miners freely chose to sign yellow dog contracts. Like his fellow justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Brandeis believed there could be “no liberty of contract where there was no equality of bargaining position.” Under modern industrial conditions, Holmes had written, it was natural for a worker to believe that he could not secure a fair contract unless he belonged to a union. On this basis, Justice Holmes and one other member of the high court joined in Brandeis’s dissent.

What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

What happened? The law is currently suffering from an overindulgence in the ideas first popularized by Robert Bork and others at the University of Chicago over the 1970s. Bork contended, implausibly, that the Congress of 1890 exclusively intended the antitrust law to deal with one very narrow type of harm: higher prices to consumers. That theory, the “consumer welfare” approach, has enfeebled the law. Promising greater certainty and scientific rigor, it has delivered neither, and more importantly discarded far too much of the role that law was intended to play in a democracy, namely, constraining the accumulation of unchecked private power and preserving economic liberty. Forty years ago, the famed Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky warned that it is “bad history, bad policy, and bad law to exclude certain political values in interpreting the antitrust laws.” He was right.

Economists have their glories, but i do not believe that antitrust law is one of them.

The military-industrial complex came about as a result of government’s power to use stick-and-carrot methods to rule business (which was just one part of the politicians’ efforts to rule everyone). For a stick, the politicians use anti-trust laws, interstate commerce laws, pure food and drug laws, licensing laws, and a whole host of other prohibitions and regulatory legislation. Many years ago, the government succeeded in making regulatory legislation so complex, contradictory, vague, and all-encompassing that the bureaucrats could fine and imprison any businessman and destroy his business, regardless of what he did or how hard he tried to obey the law. This legal chicanery gives the bureaucrats life-and-death control over the whole business community, a control which they can and do exercise on any whim, and against which their victims have very little defense. For a carrot, the politicians hold out large and lucrative governmental contracts. By crippling the economy with regulations and bleeding it by taxation, the government has drastically cut the number of large and profitable contracts available from the private sector, which forces many businessmen to get such contracts from the government or do without them. To stay in business, businessmen must make profits, and many of them have simply accepted government contracts, either without bothering to delve into the ethical questions or with the comforting thought that they were being patriotic. Government’s stick-and-carrot control of business has been going on for so long that most businessmen accept it as normal and necessary (just as most people accept taxes as normal and necessary).

FOR MORE THAN FIFTY YEARS, AT&T had remained intact at the pleasure of the United States government—always, as the economist Peter Temin points out, “operating at the limit of what the antitrust laws would allow.

Separately, a second Chinese antitrust agency said Wednesday that it would punish Audi AG and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV's Chrysler arm after an investigation found the two car makers had pursued monopolistic practices, in Hubei province and Shanghai respectively. Under China's antimonopoly law, the companies could face fines of as much as 10% of their sales from the preceding year. The companies have said they are cooperating, though they declined to release further details.

The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” He should have included defunct law professors. The state we find ourselves in today can be traced back to the economists of the Chicago School. We would not have highly concentrated industries if it were not for Robert Bork and the Chicago School. Like all revolutions, an organized group of ideologues developed the ideas and spread them zealously. The Chicago School, led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, was the vanguard of attack against antitrust laws. The great irony is that they decried monopolies and concentration of power, but in practice they created all the conditions necessary for them.

What’s the “best” trade-off? Such decisions typically are buried within antitrust or antimonopoly laws, as enforced by administrative agencies and interpreted by prosecutors and courts.

An aggressive enforcer of antitrust laws could win a court victory that forced the giant to relinquish market share, although the giant’s army of litigators would probably halt any such assault, and its legislative allies would discourage the assault to begin with. The more likely threat to one of the giants comes from another giant seeking to expropriate its market.

What Hill ultimately deplored more than tariffs and subsidies were the ICC and the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Congress passed these vague laws to protest rate hikes and monopolies. They were passed to satisfy public clamor (which was often directed at wrong-doing committed by Hill's subsidized rivals). Because they were vaguely written, they were harmless until Congress and the Supreme Court began to give them specific meaning. And here came the irony: laws that were passed to thwart monopolists, were applied to, thwart Hill.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called.