The Political Content of Antitrust

Although the political forces that produced the major antitrust statutes—in 1890, 1914, 1936, and 1950—varied widely, those statutes once enacted have almost always been enforced and interpreted so that economic considerations were paramount. The issue among most serious people has never been whether non-economic considerations should outweigh significant long-term economies of scale, but rather whether they had any role to play at all, and if so, how they should be defined and measured. 1