Tweet [1]
… is from page 84 of the 2009 collection of some essays by the late, brilliant Bruno Leoni, entitled Law, Liberty and the Competitive Market [2] (Carlo Lottieri, ed.); in particular, this quotation is from Leoni’s essay “The Myth and Reality of Monopolies”:
The fight against monopolies started in the modern age as a fight against the sovereign, or better, against those acts of the sovereign that subtracted certain goods from the market to reserve their production or distribution exclusively to physical or juridical persons privileged by the sovereign.
DBx: In the United States of 2018, one such juridical ‘person’ is Whirlpool, a company whose shareholders and workers are granted special privileges by the state – the state that punitively taxes American consumers who choose to do business with Whirlpool’s rivals who are outside of the U.S. and Canada.
In theory, the state protects its citizens from being victimized by monopoly power; in practice, the state compels its citizens to be victimized by monopoly power.