52 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
moguls argued openly that too much
competition among companies was bad
for the country. By the early twentieth
century, most major industries were
controlled, or soon would be, by one
giant firm. These conglomerates were
called trusts, for the complicated legal
structures that sometimes obscured their
ownership. Among the most famous
were those operated by John D. Rocke-
feller, whose Standard Oil came to own
more than ninety per cent of the do-
mestic oil-refining market, and by John
Pierpont Morgan, who controlled an
empire of steel manufacturing, railroads,
shipping, and communications net-
works. The first antitrust law, the Sher-
man Act, passed in 1890, outlawed col-
lusion or mergers among businesses
that would lead to control of a partic-
ular market. The intention was to pro-
tect fair competition, but its terms were
vague, and the new law was not strongly
enforced until at least a decade later.
Louis Brandeis, who was born and
raised in Louisville, Kentucky, gradu-
ated from Harvard Law School in 1877
and practiced law in St. Louis and Bos-
ton. He believed that, when individu-
als or corporations amassed too much
economic power, they could exert pres-
sure on the political system to favor
their interests, undermining democ-
racy. He worked on cases that fought
Morgan’s railroad monopoly and de-
fended labor laws. In 1901, President
Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign
to break up the trusts, filing lawsuits
seeking to dismantle Standard Oil and
Morgan’s railroad conglomerate, the
Northern Securities Company. He ini-
tiated lawsuits against more than forty
major corporations during his tenure,
while expanding the federal govern-
ment’s ability to investigate private en-
terprise. Roosevelt’s successor, Wood-
row Wilson, appointed Brandeis to the
Supreme Court in 1916.
Brandeis helped popularize the be-
lief that the government had a duty to
prevent any single entity from becom-
ing too dominant, and thus to insure
competitive markets. This idea influ-
enced public policy for decades. “Anti-
trust through the nineteen-seventies
was Brandeisian,” Lynn said. “Anti-
monopolism is the extension of the basic
concept of checks and balances into the
political economy.” In the mid-seventies,
a group of economists and legal schol-
ars with ties to the University of Chi-
cago and the economists Gary S. Becker
and Milton Friedman began to argue
that markets could regulate themselves,
providing a check against government
overreach and, potentially, against to-
talitarianism. In 1978, the jurist Robert
Bork published “The Antitrust Para-
dox,” which applied the Chicago School’s
arguments to competition policy. Bork
wrote that antitrust law was not in-
tended to maintain fairness in an ab-
stract sense; harm to consumers was the
only metric that mattered. If the price
that people were paying for a product
did not rise dramatically, Bork argued,
then there was no antitrust violation,
regardless of a company’s size or mar-
ket share. This came to be known as
the consumer-welfare standard.
During the Reagan Presidency, the
Chicago School’s theories took over
mainstream economics. Lynn described
this shift as “the most radical change
in thinking about power in the United
States since the country’s founding.”
“Once the enforcement of our mo-
nopoly laws was weakened, you saw
explosive growth of these dominantmonopolies,” Stoller, of the Economic
Liberties Project, told me. “These are
creatures of law and policy.” As an
illustration, he pointed to the growth
of Walmart, which in 1970 became a
publicly traded company and had ap-
proximately forty-four million dollars
in annual sales; in 1980, it reached
more than a billion dollars. By 2010,
the company was reporting annual
sales of four hundred billion dollars.
“I went into law school knowing
that we were at this moment where we
needed to rehabilitate our antitrust laws,”
Khan said. The main antitrust course
at Yale was taught by George L. Priest,
who had worked as a consultant for
Microsoft in the early two-thousands,
after the Justice Department filed an
anti-competitive-behavior suit against
the company. Priest was a friend of
Bork’s, and Bork had been a professor
at Yale’s law school when President Ron-
ald Reagan nominated him, in 1987, to
the Supreme Court. (He was rejected
by the Senate after a bitter nomination
battle.) Priest encouraged his students
to read “The Antitrust Paradox” before
the class started.
Benjamin Woodring, who workedTOPOGRAPHY
The land is a crick in the neck. An orange grove burns
and it’s sour when you burp. Whose voice is that?
There’s a fable. There’s a key. Every Ramadan,
the artery suffers first. A diet of heavy lamb
and checkpoint papers. Indigestion like a nightmare.
The Taurus sun burns your forehead. I mean the land.
The land looks white on the MRI images:
you call your grandfather. He’s been finding the land
in his stool. His body contours the mattress like a coffin.
His hand trembles. When he drinks the land,
the urine comes out rose-colored.
The land sears the esophagus. No more lemons,
the doctor says. Two pillows at least. In July,
you lived inside your grandfather like a settlement.
You ate currant sorbet from the same cup.
Did you inherit the land in your arthritic wrist?
It makes knitting hell. On the telephone,
your grandfather tells you the land is coating his eyes.
He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue.
He dies and they harness his body to the dirt.
He dies and the sun is out all week.—Hala Alyan