According to Bork’s theories, the existing antitrust statutes recognized that most monopolies were a great deal for “consumers,” and that if we only read the statutes carefully enough, and reviewed the transcripts of the legislative debates in fine-enough detail, we’d see that Congress never set out to block companies from gaining enough power to become autocrats of trade—rather, they only wanted the law to step in when the autocrats abused their power to harm “consumers.” This is the “consumer welfare” standard,
