In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938

This extremely important study by Butler Shaffer-professor of law and economist-will change the way you think of the relationship between the state and business. It makes a deep inquiry into the attitudes of business leaders toward competition during the years 1918 through 1938 to see how those attitudes were translated into proposals for controlling competition, through political machinery under the direction of trade associations. 

 What he finds is a business sector not only hostile to free markets but aggressively in favor of restrictions that would protect their interests. This, he finds, is the very source of the origins and development of the regulatory state. 

 The author chooses this period because it was a time when the entire relationship between American business and the federal government underwent dramatic upheaval. It was in this time that business forged a consensus about the scope and intensity of competition behavior that they would tolerate. This began to exhibit a disposition favoring collectivist authority over one another via government-backed enforcement agencies. 

 Free and unrestrained competition required more of them than they were willing to tolerate. It required constant innovation, a fight against falling prices, a continued effort to seek out new markets, and the willingness to subject their bottom line to consumer preferences for lower prices and better products. They saw the vibrancy of free enterprise as a threat to their firms and well being, so they used anti-business sentiment in politics to hamper the market in ways that would benefit them. 286 pages, paperback, 2008, 6x9