"Capitalism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

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of a gun. It means:аprotecting people's freedom by the arbitrary rule of unanswerable bureaucratic edicts.

What were the historical causes that led to the passage of the Sherman Act? I quote from the book by Mr. Neale:

The impetus behind the movement for the earliest legislation gathered strength during the 1870's and the 1880's. " . . After the Civil War the railways with their privileges, charters, and subsidies became the main objects of suspicion and hostility. Many bodies with re- ' vealing names like "The National Anti-Monopoly Cheap Freight Railway League" sprang up.6

This is an eloquent example of the businessmen serving as scapegoat, taking the blame for the sins of the politicians. It was the politically granted privileges the charters and subsidies of the railroads that people rebelled against; it was these privileges that had placed the railroads of the West outside the reach of competition and had given them a monopolistic power, with all its consequent abuses. But the remedy, written into law by a Republican Congress, consisted of destroying the businessmen's freedom and of extending the power of political controls over the economy.

If you wish to observe the real American tragedy, compare the ideological motivation of the antitrust laws to their actual results. I quote from Mr. Neale's book:

It seems likely that American distrust of all sources of unchecked power is a more deep-rooted and persistent motive behind the antitrust policy than any economic belief or any radical political trend. This distrust may be seen in many spheres of American life ... It is expressed in the theories of "checks and balances" and of "separation of powers." In the United States the fact that some men possess power over the activities and fortunes of others is sometimes recognized as inevitable but never accepted as satisfactory. It is always hoped that any particular holder of power, whether political or economic, will be subject to the threat of encroachment by other authorities.... [Italics mine.]

At one with this basic motivation of antitrust is its reliance on legal process and judicial remedy rather than on administrative regulation. The famous prescription of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights "to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men" is a favourite American quotation and an essential one for understanding antitrust. Without this factor it would be

" Neale, p. 23.

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impossible to explain the degree of acceptance so astonishing to those outside the United States that is accorded to the antitrust policy by those interests, especially "big business" interests, which are frequently and expensively subject to its discipline.7

Here is the tragedy of what happens to human intentions without a clearly defined philosophical theory to guide their practical implementation. The first free society in history destroyed its freedom in the name of protecting freedom. The failure to differentiate between political and economic power allowed men to suppose that coercion could be a proper "balance" to production, that both were activities of the same order which could serve as a "check" on each other, that the "authority" of a businessman and the "authority" of a bureaucrat were interchangeable rivals for the same social function. Seeking "a government of laws and not of men," the advocates of antitrust delivered the entire American economy into the power of as arbitrary a government of men as any dictatorship could hope to establish.

In the absence of any rational criteria of judgment, people attempted to judge the immensely complex issues of a free market by so superficial a standard as bigness." You hear it to this day: "big business," "big government," or "big labor" are denounced as threats to society, with no concern for the nature, source, or function of the "bigness," as if size as such were evil. This type of reasoning would mean that a "big" genius, like Edison, and a "big" gangster, like Stalin, were equal malefactors: one flooded the world with immeasurable values and the other with incalculable slaughter, but both did it on a very big scale. I doubt whether anyone would care to equate these two yet this is the precise difference between big business and big government. The sole means by which a government can grow big is physical force; the sole means by which a business can grow big, in a free economy, is productive achievement.

The only actual factor required for the existence of free competition is: the unhampered, unobstructed operation of the mechanism of a free market. The only action which a government can take to protect free competition is: Laissez-faire! which, in free translation, means: Hands off I But the antitrust laws established exactly opposite conditions and achieved the exact opposite of the results they had been intended to achieve.

There is no way to legislate competition; there are no

Ubid., pp. 422-423.

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standards by which one could define who should compete with whom, how many competitors should exist in any given field, what should be their relative strength or their so-called "relevant markets," what prices they should charge, what methods of competition are "fair" or "unfair." None of these can be answered, because these precisely are the questions that can be answered only by the mechanism of a free market

With no principles, standards, or criteria to guide it, the antitrust case law is the record of seventy years of sophistry, casuistry, and hair-splitting, as absurd and as removed from any contact with reality as the debates of medieval scholastics. With only this difference: the scholastics had better reasons for the questions they raised and no specific human lives or fortunes hung on the outcome of their debates.

Let me give you a few examples of antitrust cases. In the case of Associated Press v. United States of 1945, the Associated Press was found guilty, because its bylaws restricted its membership and made it very difficult for newly established newspapers to join. I quote from Mr. Neale's book:

It was argued in defense of the Associated Press that there were other news agencies from which new entrants might draw their news. . . . The Court held that . . . Associated Press was collectively organized to secure competitive advantages for members over non-members and, as such, was in restraint of trade, even though the non-members were not necessarily prevented altogether from competing. [The Associated Press news service was considered so important a facility that] by keeping it exclusive to themselves the members of the association impose a real hardship on would-be competitors. ... It is no defense that the members have built up a facility ... for themselves; new entrants must still be allowed to share it on reasonable terms unless it is practicable for them to compete without it [Italics mine.]8

Whose rights are here being violated? And whose whim is being implemented by the power of the law? What qualifies one to be "a would-be competitor"? If I decided to start competing with General Motors tomorrow, what part of their facilities would they have to share with me in order to make it "practicable" for me to compete with them?

In the case of Milgram v. Loew's, of 1951, the consistent refusal of the major distributors of motion pictures to grant