Yet Tucker's critique of antitrust is silent with regard to antimerger enforcement, as it was with regard to cartel prevention. I suspect that Jeffrey Tucker would not rejoice over the news that there was a horizontal merger of all paper companies in the United States. The Ludwig von Mises Institute buys a lot of paper to communicate its economic insights. I have every confidence that savvy consumers will find ways to trim the power of the paper monopoly, and I have confidence that in the long run the economic power of the paper monopoly will be cut. But I have less confidence that there would not be adverse short-run effects for consumers as a result of this hypothetical merger.
Economic theory teaches that monopolistic output restriction is inefficient.
Inefficiency in a world of scarcity may itself be immoral from the standpoint of the biblical principle of stewardship. A business community that outwardly prides itself on the virtues of free enterprise but engages in extensive horizontal integration intended to eliminate competing sources of supply and disconnected from efficiency gains, cannot expect to persuade a skeptical audience of the merits or the morality of free enterprise. To John Q. Public and Mary Q. Public, free enterprise connotes not only freedom of contract among sellers but the freedom to shop among alternative sources of supply. At the taproot, that is what the antimerger law seeks to accomplish. New technology and new entry in the long run will dissipate a monopolist's power in ways more profound than is revealed by conventional blackboard economics.