Overview

Various arguments have been advanced in favour of economic competition. Some are consequentialist, for example that it encourages the survival of the economically fittest, others are deontological, for example that it embodies certain moral rights or political liberties. The argument usually invoked nowadays by theorists and practitioners of antitrust is a consequentialist one, that competition maximises welfare. (There is a debate, which need not be pursued here, as to whether the welfare in question is consumer welfare, as EC and US antitrust tends to assume, or social welfare, as Bork argues and as economists tend to maintain.) By the same token, antitrust – a body of law and policy designed to promote or protect competition – is defended by invoking its effects on welfare. This chapter has the purely iconoclastic purpose of calling into question the welfare-based argument for competition and antitrust. Crudely, the thesis is that ‘welfare’ has either a meaning in which welfare is valuable but competition does not maximise welfare, or a meaning in which competition does maximise welfare but the fact that it does so is no justification for competition, because welfare in this sense is not worth maximising. In that case competition and antitrust are either ineffective means to a valuable end or effective means to a worthless end.