Welfare for Antitrust Lawyers

February 11, 2005 10:27 AM by S.M. Oliva | Other posts by S.M. Oliva | Comments (2)

A California court has given a “grant� of $496,800 to the American Antitrust Institute to produce a documentary that “will present stories about several antitrust cases, demonstrating the harm to consumers and ways in which the federal government, state government, and private attorneys brought relief.� The video will be distributed to high schools for inclusion in “an antitrust section that can be inserted into various social science curricula.�

The nearly half-million-dollar “grant� is, in fact, money extorted from vitamin manufacturers in an $80 million “settlement� of price-fixing charges brought by the State of California and allied class-action lawyers.

I don’t fault AAI for taking the money. AAI is an organization of professional criminals—i.e. antitrust lawyers—that advocates the destruction free markets through state violence. The government is paying AAI to teach false economics and history to high school students so they won’t resist future state interventions. The fault is with the government officials who orchestrated this, not the maggots who feed off the free market’s rotting corpse.

Of course, you’re unlikely to find any support among educators for equal time—that is, explaining the economic arguments against antitrust laws and the true history of the Sherman Act. But what else would you expect from a monopoly school system?