The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age

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.

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

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

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 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.”

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.

The new monopolists of the Gilded Age preferred to believe that they were not merely profiteering, but building a new and better society. They were bravely constructing a new order that discarded

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.

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