Park It! Home-Mobile, A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns. Godfather. You may buy. You may buy the mobile home, but not the dirt on which it was built. You buy and I tie. You buy the mobile home, I tie the dirt on which it is was built. Tying is a forced purchase: if one wants to buy X, they must buy Y; it conditions the purchase of two things when one desires only to buy one thing. Image Technical Service, Inc., et al. v. Eastman Kodak Company, 504 U.S. 451 (1992). [Footnote 4] Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) makes clear how the overabundance of a commodity creates a business appetite to regulate or control prices or output or both. Measures short of monopoly may have a salutary effect as, for example, a degree of control or supervision over prices not obtainable while the parties stood on their old footing of severalty. But that relief is apt to be only transient, for, as the costs of production decline and growth of the industry catches up with the gain in economy, the need for further controls or restraints increases. And so the restless, never-ending search for price control and other types of restraint. We held in United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co.,310 U. S. 150, that all forms of price-fixing are per se violations of the Sherman Act. The elimination of so-called competitive evils is no legal justification for such buying programs. The elimination of such conditions was sought primarily for its effect on the price structures. Fairer competitive prices, it is claimed, resulted when distress gasoline was removed from the market. But such defense is typical of the protestations usually made in price-fixing cases. Ruinous competition, financial disaster, evils of price-cutting, and the like appear throughout our history as ostensible justifications for price-fixing. If the so-called competitive abuses were to be appraised here, the reasonableness of prices would necessarily become an issue in every price-fixing case. In that event, the Sherman Act would soon be emasculated; its philosophy would be supplanted by one which is wholly alien to a system of free competition; it would not be the charter of freedom which its framers intended. ... Under the antitrust laws, numerous practices have been held to be illegal per se without regard to their precise purpose or harm. As this Court said in Northern Pacific R. Co. v. United States,356 U. S. 1, 356 U. S. 5 (1958), there are certain agreements or practices which, because of their pernicious effect on competition and lack of any redeeming virtue, are conclusively presumed to be unreasonable, and therefore illegal without elaborate inquiry as to the precise harm they have caused or the business excuse for their use. Among these practices are price-fixing, Page 393 U. S. 341 United States v. Socony-Vacuum Oil Co.,310 U. S. 150, 310 U. S. 223 (1940); division of markets, United States v. Addyston Pipe & Steel Co., 85 F. 271 (C.A. 6th Cir. 1898), affd,175 U. S. 175 U.S. 211 (1899); group boycotts, Fashion Originators Guild v. FTC,312 U. S. 457 (1941), and tying arrangements, International Salt Co. v. United States,332 U. S. 392 (1947). We have recently added to this list certain sales commission systems for the marketing of tires, batteries, and accessories by service stations affiliated with major oil companies. FTC v. Texaco Inc., ante, p. 393 U. S. 223 (1968). This Court has refused to apply a per se rule to exchanges of price and market information in the past. See American Column & Lumber Co. v. United States,257 U. S. 377 (1921); United States v. American Linseed Oil Co.,262 U. S. 371 (1923); Maple Flooring Mfrs. Assn. v. United States,268 U. S. 563 (1925); Cement Mfrs. Protective Assn. v. United States,268 U. S. 588 (1925). I believe we should follow the same course in the present case. Per se rules always contain a degree of arbitrariness. They are justified on the assumption that the gains from imposition of the rule will far outweigh the losses and that significant administrative advantages will result. In other words, the potential competitive harm plus the administrative costs of determining in what particular situations the practice may be harmful must far outweigh the benefits that may result. If the potential benefits in the aggregate are outweighed to this degree, then they are simply not worth identifying in individual cases. https://youtube/watch?v=7kAJgiLK1wA
Posted on: Thu, 25 Dec 2014 21:42:18 +0000