Anti-Antitrust

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to Farhad Manjoo’s bizarre column in yesterday’s New York Times – a column in which Manjoo complained that Amazon serves consumers so well that the general public isn’t much interested in using antitrust to break it up – my Mercatus Center colleague Bob Graboyes sent me the following note by e-mail (which I share with his kind permission):

I knew an antitrust economist long ago who told me about a landmark case in which he had some involvement. The accusation was that Xerox was monopolizing the copier market. The investigation dragged out for a while, and by the time the government’s antitrust authorities geared up for litigation, one of the first things they did was solicit competitive bids from various copier manufacturers.