The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

Hence, antitrust law was serving as a new kind of limit: a check on private power, by preventing the growth of monopoly corporations into something that might transcend the power of elected government to control. His pursuit of this goal makes it fair to call Roosevelt the pioneer of political antitrust.

The size problem is made more complex by two more factors. One is that as the size of the operation increases, “dis-economies” of scale begin to creep in, as economists since Alfred Marshall in the 1920s have suggested. For example, as a firm adds more and more employees, it needs to add more managers, and ever-more complex systems of internal cont

All of this amounts to just a more fancy way of demonstrating Roosevelt’s point: Concentrated private power can serve as a threat to the Constitutional design, and the enforcement of the antitrust law can provide a final check on private power. This, by itself, provides an independent rationale for enforcement of the antitrust laws.

As Justice William Douglas would later put it, “power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.”

They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty.”

“Men are not free,” he wrote, “if dependent industrially on the arbitrary will of another.” Economic security was a foundation on which one could really be free in a meaningful sense—hence the importance of steady but not oppressive work, of education, time and space for leisure, parks, libraries, and other institutions.

The retreat, rather, is best attributed to a combination of fear and uncertainty among those who enforce and interpret the laws—especially departments of government and federal judges.

As a business gets larger, it begins to enjoy a different kind of advantages having less to do with efficiencies of operation, and more to do with its ability to wield economic and political power, by itself or conjunction with others.

Or, as Robert Pitofsky put it, we should always be concerned that “excessive concentration of economic power will breed antidemocratic political pressures.”

Most important was the idea that grounds much of this book: that antitrust represented a democratic choice of economic structure and a check on the political and economic power of the monopolies.