Posted on 10/31/2021 6:10:53 PM PDT by blueplum
The US economy is based on a free enterprise system where the markets, not the government, determine prices. For this system to function properly, there must be competition.
"The fundamental purpose of our antitrust laws is to preserve competition and prevent markets from being monopolized," says George A. Hay, Charles Frank Reavis Sr. Professor of Law and professor of economics at the Cornell Law School. "If we had widespread monopoly our economy would be much worse off."
The first of those antitrust laws is the Sherman Antitrust Act, enacted in 1890. ...
There are three main parts of the Sherman Act...
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
It stopped being a free market system a long time ago. Sherman Antitrust is a problem, not a solution,
Where are the federal laws protecting consumers from unfair and rapines taxes by the insatiable Dems?
In the big picture, constraining government is probably far more important than preventing monopoly power.
These laws are all a bunch of B.S. The government is almost always at the bottom of a cartel that survives for an extended time - gov’t briberies and kickbacks and subsides to and from their favorite companies. The voluntary cooperation between buyers and sellers in the marketplace free from government interference will weed out the bad guys sooner or later.
Government price fixing always leads to disaster.
I dissagree. It's a problem because it hasn't been applied. We lowered the import tariffs and allowed foreign competition in sensitive markets like banking. We allowed firms to merge into "to big to fail" in order to compete against foreign companies, that had no anti-monopoly laws.
We've allowed our press to be gobbled up by 6 main corporations. There used to be laws limiting how much of the market a single firm could have.
AT&T used to be protected as a national resource. But when they finally applied the law and forced a split up it opened a bonanza of innovation and new product offerings, prices fail and quality improved.
Antitrust law is a dead letter in America. The American economy has completely been cartelized and nothing was done to prevent it.
Amazon
Wal-Mart
Insurance
Banking
"The Sherman Antitrust Act is the first in a line of federal laws protecting consumers from unfair prices"
That only works if you don't regard the Constitution as "federal laws" because the Commerce Clause predates Sherman. SCOTUS used it in 1924's Gibbons v Ogden to break up the monopoly the State of NY had granted to the Fulton Steamboat company.
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