… is from page 422 of Robert Bork’s masterful 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox:
Competition in open markets reflects the ideal of equality of opportunity, while antitrust’s longstanding and growing concern for the small and less efficient reflects a preference for equality of outcome. Outcomes are not equal in open competition, hence the pressure for more intervention by law. Nor can equality of outcome be achieved by making the slow faster, that being beyond the powers of legal compulsion, but only by holding the faster back.
DBx: In part because of the influence of Bork’s work, antitrust regulation and jurisprudence from the late 1970s until very recently took a turn for the better. It became much less hostile than it was in earlier years to successful, creative entrepreneurship and competition. Unfortunately, many people high up today in America’s antitrust bureaucracy would return antitrust to being a tool to restrain the creative and punish the successful (and, hence, reduce economic prosperity to the masses).
