In arguing against the entire field of antitrust and competition law, I have set myself quite the task. After all, antitrust is a largely unquestioned part of law and regulation in most developed countries around the world. In the United States, antitrust law has been raised to a level of importance normally reserved for the seminal documents of liberal democracy itself. For example, in 1972 the Supreme Court pronounced that

Earlier, the Court called the Sherman Act “a comprehensive charter of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as the rule of trade.” Indeed, according to political scientist Marc Allen Eisner, “antitrust was often referred to as a constitution for the American economy,” reflecting the centrality it has come to occupy in the firmament of economic regulation.

Although liberals and conservatives maintain their own unique focus and emphasis for antitrust, most scholars and policymakers across the political spectrum support some degree of antitrust enforcement. As economists Kenneth Elzinga and William Breit wrote, antitrust is “one of those rare issues that cuts across even the most formidable of ideological barriers.” Democratic U.S. Senator Howard Metzenbaum, writing in the Antitrust Law Journal in 1987, asserted that “if you are for free enterprise, then you must be for antitrust. You can't be for one and against the other.” By the same token, economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago—a school famous for a restrained approach to competition law—claimed that antitrust is “public interest law in the same sense in which … having private property, enforcement of contracts, and suppression of crime are public-interest phenomena.”

Regardless of the approach taken to antitrust—whether traditional, structuralist, Chicago, Harvard, post-Chicago, or Neo-Brandeisian— most all scholars and policymakers today agree that antitrust is an essential aspect of the legal system regulating the economy.