4 Forces Driving More
through more efficiency, lower prices, and greater supply. Enforcing
antitrust legislation was crippling companies who needed monopoly
power to compete in a global economy. When Ronald Reagan assumed
the presidency in 98 , his administration stopped enforcing antitrust
laws. When Bill Clinton took over in 99 , he carried on the same prac-
tice “with even greater abandon.”
As business journalist Barry Lynn summarized it, “If antitrust law
exists to serve the consumer, and if consumers are best served by getting
more for less, and if the best way to get more for less is to encourage
business to be ‘efficient,’ and if the best way to be efficient is to build
up scale and scope, then ergo, monopoly is the best friend of the
consumer.”
In the four decades since 980 , antitrust and competitive conditions
have been largely swept away before most Americans realized what
happened. A market economy still exists. But national prosperity
is no longer tethered to independence and opportunity from having
many buyers and sellers. Believing that lower prices make them better
off, consumers have gone along. Once-important values, not always
reflected in the prices and quantities recorded by markets, have fallen
by the wayside.
Today, consolidation and control of markets dominate food pro-
duction. Agribusinesses have grown larger by buying companies in
the same line of production and buying companies that had previously
provided them with raw materials or sold finished products. At Iowa
State University, lawyer and economist Neil Harl warned that such two-
way mergers and acquisitions were a “deadly combination.” The ability
to dominate markets across several sectors of food production made it
easier to squeeze concessions, off-load risk, manipulate market trans-
actions, and curry government favor. To believe that companies didn’t
take advantage of their newfound power was to pretend that sports cars
were never driven above the speed limit.
I watched these trends unfold while at Farmland. Formed on the eve
of the Great Depression, when farmers were legally sanctioned to “act
together” in order to offset the control of large businesses, Farmland
provided most of what farmers needed to produce and sell their prod-