To: ahhaha who wrote (1092 ) 2/17/2001 1:23:57 PM From: gpowell Respond to Now I hope you guys are starting to appreciate my often stated claim that governments are the entities which enable a monopoly to survive. ideas.uqam.ca The articles in Part Two assess antitrust's actual effects. George Bittlingmayer examines the great merger wave between 1898 and 1902, in which more than 2,500 manufacturing and mining firms disappeared through merger. Economists have long been puzzled about what caused that wave: Bittlingmayer argues it was caused by antitrust. You probably thought that antitrust enforcement prevented mergers. It does now, but as Bittlingmayer shows, the Sherman Antitrust Act was used to prevent companies from making loose cartel agreements. So, prevented from colluding, the firms merged. If the Sherman Act and Clayton Act didn't address a pressing public interest, why were they passed? Part Four addresses that issue. In "Antitrust Before the Sherman Act," Donald Boudreaux, Thomas DiLorenzo, and Steven Parker write that the major groups that lobbied for a Missouri antitrust law in the 1880s--a precursor to the federal Sherman Act--were rural cattlemen and butchers who wanted to "thwart competition from the newly centralized meat-processing facilities in Chicago." They find that between 1880 and 1890, Missouri beef prices fell by 13 percent and cattle output rose by 50 percent. Although the price fall by itself is consistent with the idea that the central meat-processing facilities were a monopoly buyer of beef, the increase in output is evidence against. Disappointingly absent from the book is DiLorenzo's earlier article in which he demonstrated that most of the industries supposedly monopolized by the trusts--bituminous coal, lead, leather, linseed oil, liquor, petroleum, salt, sugar, and steel--had falling prices and rising output in the decade before the Sherman Act. reason.com
