Miscellaneous Business Regulation

In the miscellaneous category we shall analyze the effects of two other types of market intervention: antitrust laws and anti-discrimination labor laws (as the latter pertain to private employment). One commonality, we shall find, is that both of these types of legislation are by nature somewhat vague and subjective, and consequently many of their effects result from uncertainties about how the law is supposed to be interpreted and obeyed.

Antitrust laws are laws that seek through various penalties and coercive restraints to prevent "overly large" corporations from acquiring "undue" profits by "restricting competition." Although the terms enclosed in quotation marks can (as we shall see in a moment) be assigned objective meanings, those meanings cannot be reconciled with the nature of these laws. A semblance of justification for antitrust legislation is therefore obtained only by applying these terms in a highly subjective manner.      Next page


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