On 24/12/24 10:12, Daniela Tafani wrote:
La tesi di Sherman era che l'autocrate del commercio ha automaticamente un potere politico analogo a quello di un re:
"If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.”
Cito da Tim Wu, The Curse of Bigness (2018), capitolo 4. Si parla dell'antitrust fra le due guerre, motivato anche dalla consapevolezza del nesso fra le concentrazioni industriali tedesche e il nazismo. Nel secondo capoverso si menziona in particolare l'IG-Farben, un nome che chi ha letto "Il sistema periodico" (Vanadio) di Primo Levi dovrebbe ricordare. A presto, MCP --- segue citazione The road to peak antitrust was not entirely smooth. The laws did suffer a near death experience in the early 1930s, at a time when nationalization and central planning were in fashion around the world. During FDR’s first New Deal, Congress effectively suspended the laws in a failed effort to generate economic recovery.* But the law began its recovery under a succession of prominent and effective Neo-Brandeisians, including Robert Jackson, the future Supreme Court Justice, and the legendary Thurman Arnold, the Wyoming Cowboy, who inherited Theodore Roosevelt’s trustbuster mantle, and who brought about a “shock treatment” campaign amounting to an astonishing 1,375 complaints in 213 cases involving 40 industries.† But the real political support for the laws in the postwar period came from the fact that they were understood as a bulwark against the terrifying examples of Japan, Italy, and most of all the Third Reich. As antitrust scholar Daniel Crane writes, **“the post-War currents of democracy-enhancing antitrust ideology arose in the United States and Europe in reaction to the role that concentrated economic power played in stimulating the rise of fascism.”** Thurman Arnold was more blunt: “Germany became organized to such an extent that a Fuehrer was inevitable; had it not been Hitler it would have been someone else.” ***Hitler’s rise and exercise of power were facilitated by the German Republic’s tolerance of monopolies in key industries, including the Krupp armaments company, Siemens railroad and infrastructure, and, most of all, the I.G. Farben chemical cartel. As a report by the Secretary of War concluded: “Germany under the Nazi set-up built up a great series of industrial monopolies in steel, rubber, coal, and other materials. The monopolies soon got control of Germany, brought Hitler to power, and forced virtually the whole world into war. That conclusion came from the observation that the main German monopolists, over the 1930s, threw their weight behind the Nazi regime when it lacked support among other key groups, and that each ultimately became deeply allied with and enmeshed in the German war effort. As a U.S. military report concluded in 1945, I.G. Farben became “a colossal empire serving theGerman State as one of the principal industrial cores around which successive German drives for world conquest have been organized.” Ultimately some twenty-four Farben executives were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg, for practicing human enslavement in occupied territories, among other offenses. As for I.G. Farben, it was subject to an American style breakup into nine firms, including three large ones: Bayer, Hoechst, and BASF.*** Concerns that excessive corporate concentration undermined democracy prompted Congress to once again strengthen the antitrust laws, in a new “Anti-Merger Act.” Politically, the law was explicitly styled as a reaction to the German and Soviet examples. As Senator Estes Kefauver put it: I think we must decide very quickly what sort of country we want to live in. The present trend of great corporations to increase their economic power is the antithesis of meritorious competitive development … Through monopolistic mergers the people are losing power to direct their own economic welfare. When they lose the power to direct their economic welfare they also lose the means to direct their political future. He then turned to antitrust’s relationship to democracy. I am not an alarmist, but the history of what has taken place in other nations where mergers and concentrations have placed economic control in the hands of a very few people is too clear to pass over easily. A point is eventually reached, and we are rapidly reaching that point in this country, where the public steps in to take over when concentration and monopoly gain too much power. The taking over by the public through its government always follows one or two methods and has one or two political results. It either results in a Fascist state or the nationalization of industries and thereafter a Socialist or Communist state. The Anti-Merger Act, nicknamed the “Celler–Kefauver Act,” passed by large majorities in 1950, and gave the government new tools to prevent the buildup of giants firms in advance, by controlling—or undoing—mergers. Instead of trying to break up the giants decades later, its idea was to prevent their formation in the first place. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission now had a powerful new tool for controlling bigness—one that was, in fact, potentially the most powerful.