Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 322 of Robert Higgs’s insightful and critical review – titled “Origins of the Corporate Liberal State” and first appearing in the Fall 1991 issue of Critical Review – of Martin Sklar’s 1988 book, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916, as this review is reprinted in the excellent 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan (footnote deleted; link added; brackets original to Higgs):

Not even Standard Oil, the most notorious of the trusts, could control the market. After the turn of the century, Standard’s competitors steadily gained market share in the petroleum-refining industry as they, unlike Standard, developed new sources of petroleum in Texas and Oklahoma and concentrated on supplying fuel oil and gasoline, for which the market was growing rapidly, rather than Standard’s mainline product, kerosene. Even during the late nineteenth century, however, as Dominick Armentano observes, “Standard’s price and output behavior [that is, its rapidly falling real price and rapidly rising output] is entirely consistent with what would have been expected under competitive conditions…. There was no restriction of supply, and monopoly prices were never realized…. Standard was a large, competitive firm in an open, competitive market.” Standard’s suppression of competition is a myth.