Those who alledge that the purpose of anti-trust laws is to protect competition, enterprise and efficiency, need to be reminded of the following quotation from Judge Learned Hand’s indicment of ALCOA’s so-called monopolistic practices:
“It was not inevitable that it should always anticipate increases in the demand for ingot and be prepared to supply them. Nothing compelled it to keep doubling and redoubling it’s capacity before others entered the field. It insistes that it never excluded competitors: but we can think of no more effective exclusion than progressively to embrace each new opportunity as it opened and to face every newcomer with capacity already geared into a great organization, having the advnatage of expertice, trade connections and the elite of personnel.”
ALCOA is being condemed for being to successful, to efficient and too good of a competitor. Whatever damage the antitrust laws may have done to our economy, whatever distortions of the structure of the nation’s capital they may have created, these are less disasterous than the fact that the effective purpose, hidden intent and the actual practice of the antitrust laws in the United Stateshave led to the condemnation of the productive and proficient members of our society because they are productive and efficient.
Based on a paper given by Alan Greenspan at the Antitrust Seminar of the National Association of Business Economists in Cleveland, September 25th, 1961
Shortly after the successful vote to put now Justice Alito onto the SCOTUS, Ben Bernanke was voted to be the 14th Chairman of the Federal Central Bank, thus bringing the final chapter to the tenure of Alan Greenspan.
Although he’ll never see this, I’d just like to thank him for his twenty some-odd years of service, through the recessions and the gravy times, the bulls and the bears and through peacful times and those that were not so peaceful.
It was his job to make sure the US economy (and therefore, a major part of the world economy) was strong enough to grow, and grow we did. When we look back on the Greenspan years, we’ll laugh at the deficits and the surpluses and keep up the fight to lower our tax rates, remembering that taxing money from our wallets to put into someone elses’ wallet is akin to making us slaves to not only the government, but to the recipient of the tax dollars.