Economics textbooks portray the harm of monopoly as its tendency to restrict supply and set high prices. But in the case of the Trust, the goal was to make a cheap product, and so the effect was to depress prices—can there be any harm in that? Yes, and in fact this is a case where the greater harm of monopoly reveals itself to be not economic but expressive. The Trust’s rules controlled not just costs, but the very nature of what film, as a creative medium, could be. In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of
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Censorship
