In the early 1900s, the biggest monopolists of the day had virtually complete control of their markets. Standard Oil. US Steel. The American Sugar Refining Company.
Today we don’t so much have single companies dominating an entire industry as much as a handful of extremely powerful ones. Over the past few decades, the number of markets consolidated by a few mega-companies has skyrocketed, according to Columbia law professor Tim Wu. [...]
Wu points to the beer industry as a perfect example. “People may not realize this, but domestically, there are two companies that sell 75 percent of the beer in the United States — Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, both owned by foreign companies,” he says. “That is an industry that used to have five or six actors and now has two.” [...]
It is essentially a battle between the economists and the lawyers. The economists do believe we should have no sense of right and wrong, but that it’s about economic performance. The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called “bad guys” — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy. So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.
The opposite tradition I’d associate with [Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis, who took the antitrust law not as merely an economic tool — though it was that — but a promotion of certain values he thought were central to the American public, like decentralization and a certain kind of virtue in business. Brandeis believed business could be a profession and pursued in a virtuous way. He also thought that the whole goal of the American Republic was to inculcate virtue and good character in people.
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