SUPERIOR EFFICIENCY IS NEVER WELL UNDERSTOOD BY POLICY-MAKERS.

Power Line's Steven Hayward notes that the Justice Department has finally closed the 1911 Standard Oil (221 U.S. 1) case.

It gives Mr Hayward the chance to spike the football, as (to this day) there are supposedly intelligent people who believe that John D. Rockefeller secured that monopoly in kerosene refining through predatory pricing.  "I remember bringing [John S. McGee's 'Predatory Price Cutting: The Standard Oil (N.J.) Case.'] to the attention of one of my liberal history professors back in my graduate student days (yes, surprise—surprise—I could be a bit of a nuisance to my professors in the classroom) and he was aghast that anyone could think something so outrageous as this. 'Oh my!,' he said."

I'd had several opportunities over the years to teach Standard Oil either in the upper-division antitrust economics course or the lower-division (plus a few seniors looking for three more credits) survey of public policy course.  The real secret to Standard wasn't in selling at a loss, it might have been in getting the railroads to sell at a loss.  With a larger or more efficient refinery in Cleveland, Standard would have been able to talk to New York Central.  "What sort of deal can you give us to move thirty tank cars each day?"  Then "We saw a tank of Whoever Oil on that train.  Will you rebate the difference between their rate and ours to us on each car of Whoever you haul?  Or do we have to talk to the Nickel Plate?"  There was a Journal of Law and Economics article about monopolizing transportation came out sometime in the 1990s that I could work in.  Vertical integration works that way.

And there lies the real challenge of antitrust policy.  Being able to ship refined kerosene in trainload lots is a benefit of consolidation.  Being able to undersell Whoever's kerosene in Buffalo or Hoboken and make Whoever help pay for the privilege deprives consumers of one benefit of competition.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department also closed a case involving restraint of trade in player-piano rolls, a primitive form of software rendered obsolete in numerous ways in the past century.

Is there no miracle President Trump can't perform?