The Goals of Antitrust: The Legislative Perspective

For Louis Brandeis, antitrust would serve both social and economic goals. He saw complete harmony in critiquing the economic justification for corporate power, on terms familiar to modern antitrust analysis, while pressing the larger case for democracy and industrial liberty. Legislatures can, and should, take an expansive view. As a starting point, Brandeis believed that values other than economics would be served by the protection of competition through antitrust, chief among them the preservation of democracy and individual initiative. This was not a subtle view. He went so far as to say that “we cannot maintain democratic conditions in America if we allow organizations to arise in our midst with the power of the [U.S.] Steel Corporation.” For Brandeis, democracy was more than just the ability to cast a vote; it rested on the ability of Americans to participate fully in the industrialized economy. When he described the harm from monopoly, Brandeis bemoaned the passage of the day when “nearly every American boy could look forward to becoming independent as a farmer or mechanic, in business or in professional life.” Brandeis saw this “industrial liberty” as integral to political liberty. He held a Jeffersonian view of the world, believing “that in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.” This was a view shaped by his times–the populist opposition to the power of the trusts in the late 19^th and early 20th century and then the arrival of the Great Depression, when he warned of the “gross inequality in the distribution of wealth and income which giant corporations have fostered.”