Gary Hull

The Abolition of Antitrust asserts that antitrust laws—on economic, legal and moral grounds—are bad, and provides convincing evidence supporting arguments for their total abolition. The Sherman Antitrust Act and the body of case law that it has generated must be seen in the broader context of traditional concerns that government has always had with monopolies in the United States, from the nineteenth century onwards. Every year new antitrust prosecutions arise in the U.S. courts, as in the cases against 3M and Visa/MasterCard, as well as a number of ongoing antitrust cases, such as those involving Microsoft and college football's use of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Gary Hull and the contributing authors show that these cases—as well as the very Antitrust Act itself—are based on an erroneous interpretation of the history of American business, are premised on bad economics and equivocate between economic and political power—the power to produce versus the power to use physical force. They argue that antitrust prosecutions are based on a horrible moral inversion: that it is acceptable to sacrifice America's best producers.… (més)