Page 870

efficiency (using the least amount of resources for optimal output)—and thereby maximizes consumer welfare.°

Recently, however, many in the conservative movement have taken a broader view of antitrust. They point out that the authors of our antitrust laws did not intend this purely economic understanding of competitive markets—and the normative assumptions that undergird it—to guide their legislation. First, these principles were only imperfectly worked out at the time the antitrust laws were passed. Second, contemporaneous statements concerning the Sherman and Clayton Acts demonstrate Congress’s concern about the political and economic power of the oil and railroad trusts of the first Gilded Age, and their influence on democratic institutions and civil society. Antitrust law can combat dominant firms’ baleful effects on democratic institutions such as free speech, the marketplace of ideas, shareholder control, and managerial accountability as well as collusive behavior with government.

Republican Senator John Sherman explained to Congress in support of his eponymous legislation:

If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.°

Similarly, identifying the institutional threats that market concentration can pose, the former Republican President and future Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft wrote at the time,

The federal antitrust law is one of the most important statutes ever passed

in this country. It was a step taken by Congress to meet what the public had found to bea growing and intolerable evil in combinations between many who had capital employed in a branch of trade, industry, or transportation, to obtain control of it, regulate prices, and make unlimited profit.

Taft saw in this economic threat broader implications for American society since “the building of great and powerful corporations which had, many of them, intervened in politics and through use of corrupt machines and bosses threatened us with a plutocracy.””

Others in the conservative movement have maintained for numerous decades that an economic justification is the only coherent approach to the antitrust laws. Many view the first 90 years of U.S. antitrust policy as unprincipled in its approach, often resulting in policies that, by trying to protect smaller competitors, ended up