The Antitrust Religion. Edwin S. Rockefeller

when activities will be regarded as lawful efforts to compete or unlawful efforts to obtain or abuse a monopoly. Lacking a definition of competition, we, as the public, do not know how to measure it or how to tell whether or not it is being lessened. We have no consistent policy as to when we favor it or oppose it. When court decisions about competition seem to contradict each other, antitrust professors tell students, “Perhaps each case is a product of convictions dominant at the time it was decided.”¹⁹ “Convictions” could be translated as “hunches” or “whims,” and one might ask, “Whose convictions about what?”

      There is no consensus on what meaning to give to the word “competition.” Most people in business say they favor competition, and yet they use government to protect themselves from it any way they can. At least five different meanings of the word “competition” have been suggested: (1) rivalry, (2) the absence of restraint over one person’s economic activities by another, (3) that state of the market in which the individual buyer or seller does not influence the price by his purchases or sales, (4) the existence of fragmented industries and markets preserved through the protection of viable, small, locally owned businesses, and (5) “any state of affairs in which consumer welfare cannot be increased by moving to an alternative state of affairs through judicial decree.”²⁰