Tom DiLorenzo on the Sherman Antitrust Act and myth of monopolies

I was studying antitrust at the time.  And, of course, when I was teaching, I was teaching the Austrian theory of competition, not the perfect competition theory of competition.  And I noticed that every single textbook said that in the late nineteenth century, there was a rampant monopolization of American industry, and that justified the antitrust laws.

I was the very first person to dig up the actual statistics on such things as production and prices of the industries that were accused of being monopolies by the Senate and the House of Representatives in the late 1880s before they passed the Sherman Act.  And I published this article showing that instead of output restriction, there was massive expansion.  These industries were the fastest-growing and most productive industries in America at the time, which is why they were being picked on by their less successful rivals, who got the politicians to pass a law that would hamper them.  The same with prices.  They dropped prices faster than the CPI dropped for ten years prior to the Sherman Act and ten years after the Sherman Act.  The only reason I was the first one to do that is that no one else had asked this question from an Austrian perspective every before.

So if you have Austrian economics and libertarian theory in your educational background, you look at history very differently.

~ Tom DiLorenzo, "The Importance of Human Action To Me," The Misesian, May-June 2024