By the time he took over the antitrust department in the 1930s, the United States, once a nation of small businesses and farms, was dominated by monopolies and cartels in nearly every industry. As the economist Alfred Chandler famously described it, the American economy was now dominated by the “visible hand” of managerial capitalism.6 This despite the fact that the text of the Sherman Act, the main antitrust law, wasn’t (and isn’t) all that ambiguous. The law explicitly made monopolization and deals in restraint of trade illegal. A nonlawyer can understand this from reading sections one and
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