Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 183 of George Stigler‘s 1971 essay “Can Regulatory Agencies Protect the Consumer?” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 11 of Stigler’s 1975 collection, The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation:

Regulation and competition are rhetorical friends and deadly enemies….

DBx: Indeed they are.

In practice, the only way for private firms to secure monopoly power is first to secure special privileges from the state. All such privileges, of course, are camouflaged as public-spirited restraints upon market activities.