Alan Greenspan Was Right! (About Antitrust, Anyway)

https://mises.org/library/alan-greenspan-was-right-about-antitrust-anyway

The world of antitrust is reminiscent of Alice's Wonder-land: everything seemingly is, yet apparently isn't, simultaneously. It is a world in which competition is lauded as the basic axiom and guiding principle, yet "too much" competition is condemned as "cutthroat." It is a world in which actions designed to limit competition are branded as criminal when taken by businessmen, yet praised as "enlightened" when initiated by the government. It is a world in which the law is so vague that businessmen have no way of knowing whether specific actions will be declared illegal until they hear the judge's verdict — after the fact. (Alan Greenspan, "Antitrust," in Ayn Rand, ed., Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1962)

Greenspan  was also right when he concluded in the same essay that "the entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance" and is the product of "a gross misrepresentation of history, and of rather naïve, and certainly unrealistic, economic theories."

In Power and Market Murray Rothbard pointed out that almost the entire economics profession has aided and abetted this "irrationality and ignorance" by constructing a theoretical apparatus (the "perfect-competition" model and myriad theories of "imperfect" competition) that has long served as an intellectual "justification" for one of the most destructive forms of economic interventionism.

Only the Austrian School, with a much more intellectually rigorous understanding of competition and monopoly, has provided consistent opposition to the destructiveness of antitrust regulation. The Austrian economists' theories of competition and entrepreneurship have always been at the heart of their contributions to all economic debates (not just the antitrust debate), from the famous socialist-calculation debate of the early 20th century to criticisms of central banking as just another cartel, to government regulation of industry in general, and many other issues. The Austrian theory of competition as a dynamic, rivalrous process of entrepreneurship and discovery — as opposed to a set of static mathematical equilibrium conditions (as with the "mainstream" theory) — is a cornerstone of the Austrian School of economics.