Schools brief | When big isn’t beautiful

What more should antitrust be doing?

The first of a series on areas where economists are rethinking the basics

DONALD TURNER, America’s top trustbuster in the mid-1960s, saw antitrust law as benefiting from an “inhospitable” tradition: on many matters its default response was to say no. Government lawyers routinely blocked mergers merely on the grounds that the resulting company would be too big. The companies’ counterargument that being bigger would make them better was rarely entertained by the courts.

This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “From hospitality to hipsterism”

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