Knowledge And Decisions

Antitrust policy, like utility regulation, exhibits a strong bias towards incumbents — toward protecting competitors rather than competition. This is readily understandable as institutional policy: Competitors bring legal complaints; competition as an abstract process cannot. Competitors supply administrative agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission with a political constituency; competition as an abstraction cannot. It is only when governmental agencies are seen as decision makers controlled by people with their own individual career and institutional goals that many apparently “irrational” antitrust policies make sense. For example, although antitrust laws are ostensibly aimed at monopolistic practices, the actual administration of such laws — and especially the Robinson-Patman Act — has involved prosecuting primarily small businesses, most of whom are not even listed in Moody’s Industrials and very few of whom are among Fortune’s list of giant corporations.⁹⁵ The institutional reason is simple: A case against a small firm is more likely to be successful, because small firms do not have the money or the legal departments that large corporations have. A major antitrust case against a giant corporation can go on for a decade or more. A prosecution against a small business can be concluded — probably successfully — within a period that is within the time horizon of both the governmental agencies and their lawyers’ career goals.

The “rebuttable presumption” of guilt after a prima facie showing by the government facilitates successful prosecutions, especially on complex matters subject to such different retrospective interpretations that no one can conclusively prove anything. In one well-known case, an employer with only 19 employees, and who had about seventy competitors in his own city alone, had to prove that his actions did not “substantially lessen competition” — and he lost the case.⁹⁶ It confirms the wisdom of putting the burden of proof on the government in most other kinds of prosecutions.

In general, the public image of antitrust laws and policy is of a way of keeping giant monopolies from raising prices, but most major antitrust cases are against businesses that lower prices — and most of the businesses involved are small businesses.

ECONOMIC “PLANNING”

Economic “planning” is one of many politically misleading expressions. Every economic activity under every conceivable form of society has been planned. What differs are the decision making units that do the planning — which range from children saving their allowances to buy toys to multinational corporations exploring for oil to the central planning commission of a communist state. What is politically defined as economic “planning” is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by government officials. The merits and demerits of this mode of economic decision making can be discussed in general or in particular, but the issue is not between literal planning on the one hand versus letting things happen randomly, on the other. This obvious point needs to be emphasized and insisted upon, not only because of the general tendentiousness of the word “planning,” but also because of specific laments about how “accident,” “chance,” or “uncoordinated” institutions⁹⁷ lead to “helplessness” as the economy “drifts.”⁹⁸

We have already examined particular examples of the government’s superseding of other people’s plans, as in various forms of price control, control of particular markets, or direct or indirect transfers of resources. What remains to be examined is comprehensive economic “planning” — the subordination of nongovernmental economic decisions in general to a design imposed on the whole economy. This can take place while retaining private ownership of physical or financial assets (capitalism), as happened under fascist regimes, or government ownership of the means of production (socialism) may accompany comprehensive “planning,” or such government ownership may coexist with market pricing mechanisms instead of “planning,” as in so-called “market socialism” (Yugoslavia being an example). There are also welfare states (such as in Sweden) which may call themselves “socialist” but which operate largely through tax transfers of income earned in a private economy, rather than through comprehensive government control of production decisions. The focus of the analysis here will be comprehensive economic “planning” in general, rather than its particular political or ideological accompaniments. That is, the analysis will be in terms of institutional characteristics rather than hoped-for results.

Comprehensive economic “planning” faces many of the same problems already noted in particular kinds of governmental direction of economic activities — essentially, problems of knowledge, articulation, and motivation.

ARTICULATION