… is from page 71 of the original, 1982 edition of Dominick Armentano’s superb but regrettably neglected volume Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure:
Efficiency is always exclusionary of less efficient competitors, but such exclusions are the very purpose of a competitive process.
(I would have said instead that “such exclusions are one of the very purposes of a competitive process,” but the importance of Armentano’s point stands.)
In the late 1980s I met the Columbia University economist Donald Dewey, and became pretty good friends with him and his wife, Ruth, until his death in 2002. Don was one of the 20th-century’s leading scholars in the field of industrial organization and antitrust. Although not especially political – it just wasn’t his style – I heard Don on several occasions lament the fact that Armentano’s Antitrust and Monopoly goes largely overlooked by antitrust scholars. Don regarded Dom’s book as a genuinely path-breaking contribution. In this assessment, as in so many others, Don was correct.
