The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

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

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

All who recall the condition of the country in 1890 will remember that there was everywhere, among the people generally, a deep feeling of unrest. The nation had been rid of human slavery, fortunately, as all now feel—but the conviction was universal that the country was in real danger from another kind of slavery sought to be fastened on the Ameri

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

If he had a unifying principle, politically and economically, it is what we have said: that concentrated power in any form is dangerous, that institutions should be built to human scale, and society should pursue human ends. Every institution, public and private, runs the risks of taking on a life of its own, putting its own interests above those o

“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.

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.

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.