Court Opinion

ID: 9475647
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:34:10.123697+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:50.746848
License: Public Domain

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge, dissenting in part.
In 1972 Chicago had one professional basketball team, playing at the Stadium. In 1973 Chicago had one professional basketball team, playing at the Stadium. The district court found the team to be a natural monopoly and the Stadium to be an “essential facility”, so no matter who owned the Bulls, Chicago was doomed to have one professional basketball team, playing at the Stadium. The change of ownership in July 1972 did not alter the structure of the market or the potential for new entry. It did not reduce the quantity produced, increase the price charged, or affect the quality supplied. There is no claim of consumers’ injury, actual or potential, now or in the future. For their role in this non-event, the defendants have been ordered to pay more than $12 million under the Sherman Act.
I
Although consumers, the beneficiaries of the antitrust laws, did not lose from the transfer to CPSC rather than IBI, they may have gained. On the district court’s findings, the Bulls and the Stadium are monopolies. One is a supplier to the other. (The Bulls supply fans to the Stadium or the Stadium supplies an arena to the Bulls; it doesn’t matter which.) When two monopolists stand in succession on the way to the final product, each may try to charge a monopoly price. If each does so, the final price to the consumers will exceed even the price a single, rational monopolist would charge. The first monopoly price in the chain will present the other firm with a higher cost of doing business. The second firm then will try to monopolize the market, but because his cost of doing business is higher, his monopoly price to the consumer also will be higher. The final price to the consumer is higher, and output lower, than it would be if a single firm operated both stages of production. A merger of the two monopolists therefore makes consumers better off. See IV Philip Areeda & Donald F. Turner, Antitrust Law ¶ 1012b (1980); Roger D. Blair & David L. Kaserman, Law and Economics of Vertical Integration and Control 31-36 (1983); Robert H. Bork, The Antitrust Paradox 230 n.* (1978); F.M. Scherer, Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance 300-02 (2d ed. 1981); Frederick R. Warren-Boulton, Vertical Control of Markets 51-63, 80-82 n. 1 (1978). Propositions about the economics of mergers often are filled with ifs and maybes; competing schools of thought produce different prescriptions. That successive monopolies injure consumers is a proposition on which there is unanimous agreement.
The two monopolists might be able to work things out by contract so that they do not try to collect two monopoly profits. But such contracts may be hard to negotiate and enforce as conditions of demand change. Any change will create opportunities for one party to take advantage of the other, and in the process injure consumers. Vertical integration is an especially durable and flexible long-term contract, and it takes care of the problem of successive monopolies. Cf. Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies 104-05 (1975) (integration is beneficial when parties have long-term relations that create opportunities for exploitation); Benjamin Klein, Robert G. Crawford & Armen A. Alchian, Vertical Integration, Appropriable Rents, and the Competitive Contracting Process, 21 J.L. & Econ. 297 (1978).
So long as the Stadium was in a position to charge the Bulls a monopoly price, the consumers might have been injured not only by double monopoly pricing but also by receiving lower quality. The owner of the Bulls had less reason to improve the team’s standing if the Stadium could capture the benefits through higher rent.
Ownership by CPSC rather than IBI also made the NBA happy, which implies benefits to the league as a whole (and thus consumers of basketball throughout the nation). The source of benefits to the league *564as a whole may be conjectural, but when the challenged acts do not produce demonstrable losses to consumers, inability to quantify the benefits is of no moment. Rothery Storage & Van Co. v. Atlas Van Lines, Inc., 792 F.2d 210, 229 n. 11 (D.C. Cir.1986).
II
Let us now suppose, however, that consumers are indifferent between IBI and CPSC as owners of the Bulls. That is the assumption most favorable to IBI. It may be forced on us by the defendants’ failure to articulate in the district court, or here, the potential efficiencies I have discussed. Still, IBI did not argue, and the district court did not find, that there is any potential injury to consumers. This silence all around marks the case for what it is — a spat among business rivals, in which consumers have no real interest. Litigation isn’t basketball. There is no overtime, and ties go to the defendant.
If Rich had accepted CPSC’s offer of June 13,1972, everything would have come out the same way it did — CPSC would have had the team, IBI would have lost profits, the Bulls and the Stadium would have been in common control. My brethren think this would have been lawful. So, too, if the NBA had turned down IBI on its own and CPSC had prevailed by default, this would have been lawful. Their objection is to CPSC’s tactics in corralling the Bulls. Yet the choice of tactics had no effect on consumers. Antitrust law condemns results harmful to consumers; it condemns bad means to the extent they have a tendency to bad results. Bad means that injure only business rivals — that is to say, business torts — are outside the scope of antitrust law. The Sherman Act “does not purport to afford remedies for all torts committed by or against persons engaged in interstate commerce.” Hunt v. Crumboch, 325 U.S. 821, 826, 65 S.Ct. 1545, 1548, 89 L.Ed. 1954 (1945). Acts that do not harm consumers need not be justified.
The Supreme Court has dealt with business torts several times, and in each the possibility that the wrong might injure consumers was a linchpin. For example, in Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 72 S.Ct. 181, 96 L.Ed. 162 (1951), a newspaper refused to take ads from anyone who also advertised on a fledgling radio station. The newspaper wanted to knock the radio station, a competitor for advertising revenues, out of the market. Success in the campaign would have reduced the number of suppliers and allowed the newspaper to raise its prices. In Walker Process Equipment, Inc. v. Food Machinery & Chemical Corp., 382 U.S. 172, 86 S.Ct. 347, 15 L.Ed.2d 247 (1965), the wrong was fraud on the Patent Office. One firm secured a patent that gave it a great, maybe dispositive, advantage. This undoubtedly stamped out effective competition between the two firms. Still, the Supreme Court said, the elimination of rivalry violates the antitrust laws only if it enables the defrauder to destroy competition in a relevant market — the market for knee-action swing diffusers, a market defined from consumers’ perspective. Injury to the business rival was insufficient; the Court remanded for an inquiry into whether purchasers of the product would be victimized by overcharges. See also, e.g., Handgards, Inc. v. Ethicon, Inc., 601 F.2d 986 (9th Cir.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1025, 100 S.Ct. 688, 62 L.Ed.2d 659 (1980); CVD, Inc. v. Raytheon Co., 769 F.2d 842, 851 (1st Cir.1985), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 1148, 89 L.Ed.2d 312 (1986), both holding that the antitrust violation lies in enforcing the patent (or trade secret) in such a way that existing competition in the product market is destroyed, and that fraud or other nasty acts in getting the rights are. not antitrust problems. This is the unanimous view of thoughtful commentators. All believe that business torts violate the antitrust laws only if they produce injury to consumers by monopolizing a market that is otherwise competitive. E.g., Ill Areeda & Turner at 1111736-39, 828-29; Bork at 330-64; Herbert Hovenkamp, Economics and Federal Antitrust Law § 5.6 (1985); Lawrence A. Sullivan, Antitrust 512-13 (1977); cf. Note, Antitrust Treat*565ment of Competitive Torts: An Argument for a Rule of Per Se Legality Under the Sherman Act, 58 Tex.L.Rev. 415 (1979). If consumers are indifferent between IBI and CPSC, why should the antitrust laws interfere? To protect Rich’s autonomous selection of a buyer for his team? Autonomy is an important value, but it is not within the domain of antitrust. See Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylva-nia Inc., 433 U.S. 36, 53 n. 21, 97 S.Ct. 2549, 2559 n. 21, 53 L.Ed.2d 568 (1977).
Antitrust is about competition, and the majority concludes that CPSC “succeeded in driving out all competition for ownership of the Bulls” (maj. op. 536). At the end of the bidding, only CPSC was in the running. But at the end of any bidding only one contestant remains. Should we say that Rich’s contract with IBI on June 14 “[drove] out all competition for the Bulls”? Or should we say that the contract was a result of competition, and that CPSC’s sin was that when Rich wanted to end the competition CPSC wouldn’t say die? How did CPSC’s strategy cut off competition, when the problem (as IBI perceived it) was that competition continued uncomfortably long? At the end of the process in July 1972, Rich got an extra $50,000, the NBA got an owner it preferred, and the fans of the Bulls had the same basketball team.
The problem is one of characterization. Almost any contract can be characterized either as the outcome of competition or as a reduction in competition. Tampa Electric Co. signs a 20-year exclusive contract for coal. Does this “drive off all competition” from excluded suppliers for the next 20 years, or is the contract the outcome of a competitive process? GTE Sylvania gives its dealer an exclusive territory, forbidding competition from other dealers. Is this a competitive move against Zenith or is it an extinguishment of competition among dealers? Ford Motor Co. signs a long-term contract for shipment of its cars to dealers, and then replaces one motor carrier with another. Is the contract (and the replacement) the extinguishment or the outcome of competition? We held in Car Carriers, Inc. v. Ford Motor Co., 745 F.2d 1101 (7th Cir.1984), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1054, 105 S.Ct. 1758, 84 L.Ed.2d 821 (1985), that a swap of one contractor for another cannot violate the antitrust laws. Would it make an antitrust difference if Ford changed contractors because one of its officials was bribed? Because the winning bidder misrepresented the quality of its service? It is easy to see why fraud and bribery are wrong, but what makes them antitrust wrongs? Or suppose the Stadium had given IBI the lease it requested, but CPSC then had whispered in Rich’s ear that one investor in IBI is a Buddhist, and religious intolerance had led Rich to sell the team to CPSC?
“[T]he legality of an agreement or regulation cannot be determined by so simple a test, as whether it restrains competition. Every agreement concerning trade, every regulation of trade, restrains. To bind, to restrain, is of their very essence.” Chicago Board of Trade v. United States, 246 U.S. 231, 238, 38 S.Ct. 242, 244, 62 L.Ed. 683 (1918). To decide whether a process that ends in a single winner, or in a restraint of some sort, is an antitrust wrong, we must ask what the antitrust laws are for. National Society of Professional Engineers v. United States, 435 U.S. 679, 687-92, 98 S.Ct. 1355, 1363-65, 55 L.Ed.2d 637 (1978). Every contract ends one form of competition and may create another. A law firm suppresses competition among its partners to create competition against other firms. So to observe that there has been a suppression of some competition— among the partners of the law firm, in Chicago Board of Trade among the members of the Board, here between IBI and CPSC — is to state rather than answer the antitrust question. The rule in Chicago Board of Trade injured all who wanted to trade at new prices while the Board was closed. It stamped out this form of competition, yet the Court sustained the rule because the Court thought it did not lead to higher prices for grain.
Does the “suppression” at hand create the sort of injury about which antitrust laws are concerned? Suppose IBI and *566CPSC had merged, which would have stamped out competition more fully. No, in either event. The plaintiffs conceded as much when they declined to argue that the suppression of competition between IBI and CPSC injured consumers. It may have injured Rich by depressing the price he received, but Rich did not complain.
The majority’s answer is that injury (at least a potential for injury) to consumers is not an essential ingredient of an antitrust case. The Supreme Court and this court have said that it is, however. E.g., Associated General Contractors v. Carpenters, 459 U.S. 519, 538, 103 S.Ct. 897, 908, 74 L.Ed.2d 723 (1983) (“the Sherman Act was enacted to assure customers the benefit of price competition”); Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U.S. 330, 343, 99 S.Ct. 2326, 2333, 60 L.Ed.2d 931 (1979) (“Congress designed the Sherman Act as a ‘consumer welfare prescription.’ ”), repeated in NCAA v. Board of Regents, 468 U.S. 85, 107, 104 S.Ct. 2948, 2964, 82 L.Ed.2d 70 (1984); Apex Hosiery Co. v. Leader, 310 U.S. 469, 500-01, 60 S.Ct. 982, 996-97, 84 L.Ed. 1311 (1940) (“Restraints on competition or on the course of trade in the merchandising of articles moving in interstate commerce is not enough, unless the restraint is shown to have or is intended to have an effect upon prices in the market or otherwise to deprive purchasers or consumers of the advantages which they derive from free competition.”); Olympia Equipment Leasing Co. v. Western Union Telegraph Co., 797 F.2d 370, 379 (7th Cir.1986) (“Most businessmen don’t like their competitors, or for that matter competition. They want to make as much money as possible and getting a monopoly is one way of making a lot of money. That is fine, however, so long as they do not use methods calculated to make consumers worse off in the long run.”); In re Wheat Rail Freight Rate Antitrust Litigation, 759 F.2d 1305, 1315-16 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 2275, 90 L.Ed.2d 718 (1986) (rejecting a claim because “[ijncreased competition, in the sense of gaining a lower price or some other benefit for the consumer, could not be the result of an imposition of antitrust liability” in the circumstances); Brunswick Corp. v. Riegel Textile Corp., 752 F.2d 261, 266 (7th Cir.1984), cert. denied, 472 U.S. 1018, 105 S.Ct. 3480, 87 L.Ed.2d 615 (1985) (“The purpose of the antitrust laws as it is understood in the modern cases is to preserve the health of the competitive process — which means ... to discourage practices that make it hard for consumers to buy at competitive prices — rather than to promote the welfare of particular competitors.”); Products Liability Insurance Agency, Inc. v. Crum & Forster Insurance Cos., 682 F.2d 660, 663-65 (7th Cir.1982) (“there is a sense in which eliminating even a single competitor reduces competition. But it is not the sense that is relevant in deciding whether the antitrust laws have been violated. Those laws, we have been told by the Supreme Court repeatedly in recent years, are designed to protect the consumer interest in competition. ... The consumer does not care how many sellers of a particular good or service there are; he cares only that there be enough to assure him a competitive price and quality____ This private
squabble does not threaten consumers’ welfare even remotely. If [the plaintiff] thinks he is wronged he must look to state law for his remedy.”); Havoco of America, Ltd. v. Shell Oil Co., 626 F.2d 549, 554 (7th Cir.1980) (“the absence of a sufficient allegation of anticompetitive effects in a Sherman Act complaint is fatal to the existence of a cause of action. It was a desire to eliminate the public injury of diminished competition which impelled Congress to enact the antitrust laws”) (emphasis in original). We are by no means the only court to take this view. E.g., Assam Drug Co. v. Miller Brewing Co., 798 F.2d 311, 315-16 (8th Cir.1986); Westman Commission Co. v. Hobart International, Inc., 796 F.2d 1216, 1220 (10th Cir.1986); Rothery Storage, 792 F.2d at 219, 228-29; Business Electronics Corp. v. Sharp Electronics Corp., 780 F.2d 1212 (5th Cir.1986), and id. at 1221-22 (Jones, J., concurring).
Granted, each case is a little different from ours. One involved standing (Reit*567er), another patents (Riegel), etc. So be it. The proof that antitrust is about consumers’ injury (and its cousin, allocative efficiency) lies in the structure of the rules, not in selected phrases. The structure is unmistakable. Judge Bork summed things up in Rotkery Storage, 792 F.2d at 214-30. I offer a few more illustrations.
1. Zenith Radio Corp. complained that it was being oppressed by a conspiracy to charge low prices, which would drive it out of the market. The Supreme Court held that injury to Zenith was irrelevant unless Zenith could show that it was harmed by something that also harmed consumers. Because Zenith could not show this, the Court strongly suggested the grant of summary judgment against Zenith. Mat-sushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., — U.S.-, 106 S.Ct. 1348, 89 L.Ed.2d 538 (1986).
2. Pacific Stationery and Printing Co. was expelled from a cooperative buying group. The boycott injured Pacific, which lost access to discounts. The expulsion “was certainly a restraint of trade”. Northwest Wholesale Stationers, Inc. v. Pacific Stationery and Printing Co., 472 U.S. 284, 105 S.Ct. 2613, 2617, 86 L.Ed.2d 202 (1985). Yet the Court found the expulsion lawful because it would not “characteristically be likely to result in predominantly anticompetitive effects” (id. at 2620-21) — by which it meant adverse effects on consumers, because the adverse effect on Pacific was conceded. See Rothery Storage, 792 F.2d at 215-29, for an analysis of refusals to deal.
3. Edwin G. Hyde was not allowed to provide anesthesia to his patients at East Jefferson General Hospital, because the Hospital had given an exclusive contract to competing anesthesiologists. The Court ignored the injury to Hyde and asked whether the arrangement could injure consumers, “whose interests the statute was especially designed to serve”, by tying anesthesia to other medical services. Jefferson Parish Hospital District No. 2 v. Hyde, 466 U.S. 2, 15, 104 S.Ct. 1551, 1560, 80 L.Ed.2d 2 (1984). After defining a market from the standpoint of consumers’ alternatives (rather than Hyde’s alternatives), 466 U.S. at 26-29, 104 S.Ct. at 1566-67, and concluding that the arrangement did not make consumers worse off (that is, did not add to or make it easier to exploit existing market power), the Court held the Hospital entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Hyde’s inability to compete was thought irrelevant.
4. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., lost business because Brunswick Corp. acquired bowling emporia. The district court found that Pueblo suffered substantial injury in fact when business was diverted to Brunswick, apparently at lower prices. The Supreme Court assumed that this injury flowed directly from a violation of the Clayton Act — Brunswick should not have acquired the lanes, because the market was already concentrated, and Brunswick held a substantial market share. It held Pueblo’s injury irrelevant, because if Pueblo suffered consumers gained. Unless Pueblo could show that it was injured by something that was also deleterious to consumers, it could not recover. Brunswick Corp. v. Pueblo Bowl-O-Mat, Inc., 429 U.S. 477, 97 S.Ct. 690, 50 L.Ed.2d 701 (1977). See also Local Beauty Supply, Inc. v. LaMaur Inc., 787 F.2d 1197 (7th Cir.1986).
5. The principle behind these cases is that to know whether a given restraint is an antitrust problem we must identify the potential effects of that restraint on consumers’ welfare and allocative efficiency. So whether the NCAA may dominate the televising of college football depends on whether the exclusive contract potentially injures viewers of football, not on whether it injures colleges that want to telecast their games. NCAA v. Board of Regents, 468 U.S. at 106-07, 113-20, 104 S.Ct. at 2963-67, 2967-71. Whether performing rights societies may license copyrighted songs through a cooperative license depends on whether this tends to restrict output and raise price, not whether it injures TV stations that cannot obtain licenses in the way they prefer. Broadcast Music, Inc. v. CBS, Inc., 441 U.S. 1, 9-10, *56819-20, 22 n. 40, 99 S.Ct. 1551, 1556-57, 60 L.Ed.2d 1 (1979); Buffalo Broadcasting Co. v. ASCAP, 744 F.2d 917 (2d Cir. 1984), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1211,105 S.Ct. 1181, 84 L.Ed.2d 329 (1985). Whether an exclusive selling territory or a nonprice restraint violates the law depends on the effect this may have on consumers, not on whether it “forecloses” competition by those who wish to sell the same product. Monsanto Co. v. Spray-Rite Service Corp., 465 U.S. 752, 762-64, 104 S.Ct. 1464, 1470-71, 79 L.Ed.2d 775 (1984); GTE Sylvania, 433 U.S. at 54-59, 97 S.Ct. at 2559-62.
The majority claims that no case requires “a plaintiff to isolate and demonstrate the consumer impact of a particular purported antitrust violation not directed at the consumer level.” Maj. op. at 536, note omitted. The cases I have discussed so far fill the bill. The defendants in Hyde restricted the opportunities of anesthesiologists; the Court required the plaintiff to show how his exclusion injured consumers. The defendant in GTE Sylvania cut off plaintiff from an opportunity to compete; the Court required the plaintiff to show how his exclusion injured consumers. The other cases follow the same pattern. These many cases also show the error of the majority’s proposition, maj. op. at 537, that “the Court has never given us to believe that anything save unfettered competition is the key to consumer well-being.” What is GTE Sylvania, BMI, Hyde, or any merger case about? See also Rothery Storage, 792 F.2d at 214-30, which establishes my point with a comprehensive survey of the Court’s decisions.
6. Liability in antitrust law almost always requires proof of market power. This is because market power is an essential ingredient of injury to consumers. Market power means the ability to injure consumers by curtailing output and raising price; no possible injury, no market power; no market power, no violation; injury to consumers is therefore an essential ingredient of liability. The Supreme Court, this court, and commentators all agree that market power must be identified from the perspective of consumers. This is what the Court did in NCAA, 468 U.S. at 109-13,104 S.Ct. at 2964-67; see also United States v. General Dynamics Corp., 415 U.S. 486, 498-504, 94 S.Ct. 1186, 1194-97, 39 L.Ed.2d 530 (1974). In this court see, e.g., Ball Memorial Hospital, Inc. v. Mutual Hospital Insurance, Inc., 784 F.2d 1325, 1334-37 (7th Cir.1986) (a supplier with about 80% of the market’s sales lacks market power because consumers cannot be injured by a reduction in its output). See also, e.g., Philip Areeda, Market Definition and Horizontal Restraints, 52 Antitrust L.J. 553 (1983); II Areeda & Turner at 1111501, 518; Robert G. Harris & Thomas M. Jorde, Market Definition in the Merger Guidelines, 71 Calif.L.Rev. 464 (1983); William M. Landes & Richard A. Posner, Market Power in Antitrust Cases, 94 Harv.L.Rev. 937 (1981); Scherer at 56-64; George J. Stigler & Robert A. Sherwin, The Extent of the Market, 28 J.L. & Econ. 555 (1985); Sullivan at 41-44, 72-74.
The market definition in this case shows why you can’t pick a market without knowing the purpose of the choice. The court has defined a market of professional basketball in Chicago. This is a plausible market, if the question is whether anything injured consumers. It looks at demand elasticity (can fans travel to Milwaukee? switch allegiance from basketball to hockey or opera?) and at supply elasticity (can new teams sell their product if the Bulls cut back output? can TV pipe other NBA games into Chicago?). Defining the market in this way shows that if the Stadium had contrived to prevent the startup of a second basketball team — as the stadium in Hecht v. Pro-Football, Inc., 570 F.2d 982 (D.C.Cir.1977), cert, denied, 436 U.S. 956, 98 S.Ct. 3069, 57 L.Ed.2d 1121 (1978), contrived to stop the advent of a second pro football team in Washington, D.C. — there would be a serious antitrust problem. This definition also shows that the sale of the Bulls to CPSC rather than IBI could not injure consumers; it did nothing to conditions of either demand or supply.
If, instead, we seek to learn whether CPSC harmed competition for a sports *569franchise, we must define a market that looks at the demand and supply possibilities facing Rich and IBI. Rich could have been injured if IBI and CPSC, in cahoots, rigged their bids, or if CPSC had prevented IBI from bidding. But Rich has not complained. To tell whether IBI’s opportunities as a would-be operator of professional teams were hampered, we must look at its options, not those of fans in Chicago. There is a national market in sports franchises, as the makeup of IBI and CPSC shows. Each syndicate includes owners of sports teams in other cities (and in other sports) around the country; Fishman himself had an interest in the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. The Second Circuit has held that there is a national market in “sports capital”. North American Soccer League v. NFL, 670 F.2d 1249 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 1074, 103 S.Ct. 499, 74 L.Ed.2d 639 (1982). There is also a national market in which arenas compete for teams. See Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission v. NFL, 726 F.2d 1381 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 990, 105 S.Ct. 397, 83 L.Ed.2d 331 (1984), and consider the saga of the Indianapolis (nee Baltimore) Colts, Indianapolis Colts v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, 775 F.2d 177 (7th Cir.1985). We need not discuss the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Washington Senators, or the Washington Senators. Which market matters depends on the theory of competition involved. See Areeda, Market Definition, 52 Antitrust L.J. at 553, 583-84. The court today chooses a market (pro basketball in Chicago) the buyers in which were unaffected by the conduct in issue; a market looking at the opportunities of Fishman and IBI, such as a market in sports franchises, would reveal that the Stadium lacked market power; either way, the lack of injury to consumers reveals that there is no violation.
7. This court has held, in a case identical to ours in every material way, that when one entrepreneur wrests a monopoly from another by foul means, the antitrust laws do not supply a remedy. It held this, moreover, on the ground my brethren reject: that only injury to consumers violates the antitrust laws. In Brunswick Corp. v. Riegel Textile Corp., 752 F.2d 261 (7th Cir.1984), cert. denied, 472 U.S. 1018, 105 S.Ct. 3480, 87 L.Ed.2d 615 (1985), Riegel stole Brunswick’s trade secret and obtained a patent for it. This expelled Brunswick from the market and ended competition. We held that the antitrust laws are indifferent to which firm is the monopolist. The consumers’ choices are unaffected. “If no consumer interest can be discerned even remotely in a suit brought by a competitor — if, as here, a victory for the competitor can confer no benefit, certain or probable, present or future, on consumers — a court is entitled to question whether a violation of the antitrust laws is being charged.” 752 F.2d at 266-67. We threw the case out, remarking that “[w]e cannot find the consumer interest in this case.” 752 F.2d at 267. We observed that Brunswick v. Pueblo had held that a firm may recover only for its injury that flows from acts that harm consumers too, and thought that it “follow[s] that if a form of wrongdoing (stealing a patentable process) cannot cause antitrust injury to anyone, because it has no tendency to raise prices or reduce output or do anything else that hurts consumer or other interests protected by the antitrust laws, it does not violate those laws at all.” 752 F.2d at 268.
The majority distinguishes Brunswick v. Riegel on two grounds: that it involved patents and that Brunswick and Riegel were not “competing” for the patent monopoly. The former is irrelevant to the theory of decision in the case. The patent was the source of the market power, as here a natural monopoly is said to be the source of the market power. The source matters not to the question whether the antitrust laws govern the process by which market power passes from Firm A to Firm B.1 The argument that Brunswick and Rie-gel were not “competing” also is irrelevant. *570The majority means by this that CPSC won by stifling IBI’s chances of buying the team, while Riegel won by theft and fraud. In every useful sense, however, both cases involve the same dispute — which of two firms shall hold a legal monopoly — and the same objection to the “unfair” means employed by one firm to win the day. That Riegel proceeded by a preemptive strike rather than waiting for a chance to prevent an auction cannot make any difference from the perspective of either the firm on the short end of the stick or the consumers in the market. Brunswick v. Riegel establishes both the appropriate theory of antitrust and the appropriate outcome of this case. It is consistent with other cases in our court, too. E.g., Havoco, 626 F.2d at 558 (rejecting a claim of unfair competition as an antitrust offense and stating that “only where a defendant with substantial market power uses the unfair means to increase its share of the market by eliminating a competitor” is there an antitrust problem).
8. Other cases in this circuit almost without exception say that the purpose of antitrust is to protect consumers’ welfare and its close relative economic efficiency. E. g., Morrison v. Murray Biscuit Co., 797 F. 2d 1430, 1437 (7th Cir.1986) (collecting cases); Olympia, 797 F.2d at 375, 379-80; Local Beauty Supply, Inc., 787 F.2d at 1202; Will v. Comprehensive Accounting Corp., 776 F.2d 665, 671-74 (7th Cir.1985), cert. denied, — U.S.-, 106 S.Ct. 1659, 90 L.Ed.2d 201 (1986); Brillhart v. Mutual Medical Insurance, Inc., 768 F.2d 196, 200-01 (7th Cir.1985); In re Wheat Rail Freight, 759 F.2d at 1315; Sutliff Inc. v. Donovan Cos., 727 F.2d 648, 655 (7th Cir. 1984); Products Liability Insurance Agency, 682 F.2d at 663-64; Phil Tolkan Datsun, Inc. v. Greater Milwaukee Datsun Dealers’ Advertising Ass’n, 672 F.2d 1280, 1287 (7th Cir.1982). So, for example, when a firm substitutes one exclusive contractor for another, we hold that there is no claim because consumers cannot be injured. Car Carriers; Great Escape, Inc. v. Union City Body Co., 791 F.2d 532, 539-40 (7th Cir.1986). This case, too, concerns the substitution of one firm for another; injury to consumers is impossible and benefit to consumers is likely.
9. The foremost scholars of antitrust agree that the laws are designed for the benefit of consumers and should not be used to advance any other interest. I Ar-eeda & Turner at 1ÍU 103-13; Bork at 50-89; Richard A. Posner, Antitrust Law: An Economic Perspective 18-20 (1976). The appropriate goals of antitrust law have been subject to great debate. But the competing approach identifies political goals such as preventing a great increase in aggregate concentration. E.g., Robert Pi-tofsky, The Political Content of Antitrust, 127 U.Pa.L.Rev. 1051 (1979). These additional objectives do not require fetching humdrum business torts within the reach of antitrust, as my colleagues would do. And other circuits, following the Supreme Court, have embraced the economic approach to antitrust. See the cases cited at 566. Take, for example, the many cases holding that injury to a business competitor is irrelevant in the absence of injury to the market (which means market structure or consumers’ welfare). E.g., Ralph C. Wilson Industries, Inc. v. Chronicle Broadcasting Co., 794 F.2d 1359, 1363 (9th Cir.1986); Hayden Publishing Co. v. Cox Broadcasting Corp., 730 F.2d 64, 68 (2d Cir.1984); Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. v. Dain, Kalman & Quail, Inc., 578 F.2d 1256,1261 (8th Cir.1978). One court recently put the principle to work by holding that “leveraging” — the use of the market position in one market to obtain an advantage in another, as CPSC did here — is unlawful only if the acquired monopoly injures consumers. There is no offense of “leveraging” in the raw. Catlin v. Washington Energy Co., 791 F.2d 1343 (9th Cir.1986).
Ill
These nine items are but a quick tour through the structure of antitrust. A constellation of doctrines shows that consumers’ welfare is the point of antitrust, and that we ask whether a given arrangement is the “suppression of competition” — as op*571posed to the outcome of competition, which always includes some restraints — by inquiring whether the practices hurt or could hurt consumers. Against all of this my brethren set the essential facilities doctrine. Maj. op. 533-35, 539-42. The owner of an essential facility (the district court found that the Stadium is one) must make the facility available on equal terms, the majority says, and the Stadium was not made available. End of case. I agree with my colleagues that the essential facilities doctrine is pertinent, but it is part of the same picture: potential injury to consumers is relevant.
I confine my attention to five essential facility cases, which show the nature and limits of the doctrine: Otter Tail Power Co. v. United States, 410 U.S. 366, 93 S.Ct. 1022, 35 L.Ed.2d 359 (1973); Omega Satellite Products Co. v. City of Indianapolis, 694 F.2d 119 (7th Cir.1982); City of Mishawaka v. American Electric Power Co., 616 F.2d 976 (7th Cir.1980), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 1096, 101 S.Ct. 892, 66 L.Ed.2d 824 (1981); Hecht v. Pro-Football, Inc., 570 F.2d 982 (D.C.Cir.1977), cert. denied, 436 U.S. 956, 98 S.Ct. 3069, 57 L.Ed.2d 1121 (1978); Union Leader Corp. v. Newspapers of New England Inc., 284 F.2d 582 (1st Cir.1960), cert. denied, 365 U.S. 833, 81 S.Ct. 747, 5 L.Ed.2d 744 (1961). These cases, like the other essential facility or “bottleneck boycott” cases, share the feature that the bottleneck was used to suppress horizontal competition that might be of benefit to consumers — competition that could survive if all firms had access to the essential facility. None involves a natural monopoly at each level, the problem we confront today.
In Otter Tail a firm with a monopoly of the nearby facilities for the long-distance transmission of electricity refused to wheel power over its lines. “Wheeling” is the receipt of power from Generator A, transmission over the lines of Firm B, for delivery to Consumer C. Otter Tail generated power and also sold power at retail in 465 towns. Four towns, including Elbow Lake, wanted to get into the retailing business. Elbow Lake tried to buy electricity from other firms, which were willing to sell if Otter Tail would wheel the power to Elbow Lake. Otter Tail refused to wheel; it also refused to sell its own power to Elbow Lake. The Court held this violated the Sherman Act, and it is easy to see why. There were three markets: the market in generation of power, the market in transmission, and the market in retail distribution (like manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing). Otter Tail held a monopoly of transmission (wholesaling). But generation of power is highly competitive, and many generating firms put their power on the nationwide grid of transmission lines owned by the many electric utilities. Elbow Lake wanted to shop among the generating firms for the best price. Elbow Lake also may have been hoping that it could distribute power at retail for less than Otter Tail’s costs. Otter Tail’s refusal to wheel power prevented Elbow Lake from shopping, and thereby had the potential to raise the prices to Elbow Lake’s consumers. Otter Tail is not a case in which a violation was found despite the absence of injury to consumers; injury was very likely. Otter Tail’s transmission prices were regulated; to make a monopoly profit it needed to seize control of an unregulated market, which it did. Otter Tail used its bottleneck to prevent Elbow Lake from receiving the benefit of ongoing competition at the generating level. So in Olympia, 797 F’2d at 376-77, in summarizing the point of the essential facility cases, we said it would be a violation for Western Union to cut off telex service to customers that buy from rival vendors of equipment: the equipment market is competitive, unless a firm uses its bottleneck to stamp out that competition. In our case, however, neither the stadium business nor the pro basketball business in Chicago would be competitive but for the denial of access to the Stadium.
Mishawaka is almost the reverse of Otter Tail. Mishawaka was in the distribution business, buying power from American Electric, another regulated firm searching for an unregulated monopoly. As a retailer, Mishawaka was in a position to shop *572around — after its existing exclusive contract with American Electric expired. Before Mishawaka could shop for power, American Electric put on a rate squeeze— that is, it charged Mishawaka more for wholesale power than it charged its retail customers for retail power. There was a direct injury to consumers. Everyone in Mishawaka paid more for power, while American Electric had the town over a barrel. And there was a potential longer-term injury. If Mishawaka had responded to the squeeze by selling its system to American Electric (so that consumers could take advantage of the lower retail rates), then consumers would have lost the long-term benefit of competition at the generation level. American Electric as retailer might use its own power and not shop for power from other generators; and if it decided to shop (to hold down its own costs) it would be under no competitive pressure to pass the savings on to the residents of Mishawaka. So again the stratagem was designed to deprive the consumers of Mish-awaka of the benefit of competition in a market (generation) that was not monopolized, and to stifle potential competition from the town itself.
The effect on consumers in Hecht is even clearer. Washington, D.C., had one pro football team, playing at Kennedy Stadium. A new pro football league proposed to operate a second team in D.C. The existing team and the stadium authority froze the new team out. The result: a city that had an opportunity to have two teams ended up with one. This is a suppression of horizontal competition. Consumers lost out. So too if IBI had wanted to lease the Stadium for a team of the American Basketball Association or the World Hockey League, in either event doubling the number of competitors. Nothing remotely like this happened in Chicago. There was and will be only one professional basketball team, the district court found. Fishman and IBI didn’t want to break up a monopoly (as the plaintiffs did in Hecht); they wanted to be the monopoly.
Omega is a different animal altogether. It involved cable TV, and the court assumed that the operation of a cable system is a natural monopoly in any area. The question was whether (the state action doctrine to one side) a city in cahoots with potential rivals could stifle any competition among operators of a cable system. The opinion, written by the author of Brunswick v. Riegel, contains a line on which the majority relies: “the antitrust laws protect competition not only in, but for, the market — that is, competition to be the firm to enjoy a natural monopoly”. 694 F.2d at 127. My colleagues conclude that the antitrust laws are not concerned with consumers’ welfare but with “fair competition” to be a monopolist. They miss why Omega was reasoned as it was. Assume that cable TV is a natural monopoly in any geographic area, which means that the average total cost of service is least if only one set of wires is hooked up to each home. There are at least three ways of getting to the single-producer outcome. One is for two or three firms to build competing grids and see who survives; that creates the inefficiency (multiple grids) we seek to avoid. A second is for the would-be rivals to sit down at a table and divide up the territory, each agreeing to provide all the service in a sector of the city and not to compete in any other sector. Then there will be only one grid per sector, but the consumer must pay a monopoly price. A third is for the firms to bid for the right to be the monopolist in a sector. Each firm may offer, say, a fixed monthly fee, and the firm bidding the lowest fee hooks up that sector. To get the business the firms will bid the price down to average total cost, both expanding output and giving the consumers (rather than themselves) the benefit of the savings from having only one grid per sector. It is a safe bet that when Judge Posner wrote in Omega that the antitrust laws protect competition for as well as in the market, he had this possibility in mind. See Richard A. Posner, The Appropriate Scope of Regulation in the Cable Television Industry, 3 Bell J.Econ. & Mgt.Sci. 98 (1972). Bidding for a natural monopoly may give consumers all the bene*573fit of competition; it is as if the bidding process could turn monopoly into competition.2 If a city sets up an auction process, and the putative competitors subvert that process by rigging bids, consumers lose and the bid-rigging violates the antitrust laws. Again this does not help IBI, for no one was suggesting that IBI and CPSC make bids on ticket prices or TV contracts, with the low bidder to get the team. That would be franchise bidding. Nothing of the sort was proposed here or frustrated by the Stadium.
Finally there is Union Leader. Two newspapers were slugging it out for what the court assumed was the inevitable survival of one. It is not really an essential facilities case. Some language in the opinion suggests that in battling for survival firms may use only “honestly industrial” practices. This hoary notion, taken from Learned Hand’s opinion in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, 148 F.2d 416, 419 (2d Cir.1945), has not survived. See Olympia, 797 F.2d at 375 (collecting cases). If there will be but one survivor, the better to be quick about getting there. E.g., Pacific Engineering & Production Co. v. Kerr-McGee Corp., 551 F.2d 790, 795-96 (10th Cir.), cert, denied, 434 U.S. 879, 98 S.Ct. 234, 54 L.Ed.2d 160 (1977) (once it is clear that the market is a natural monopoly, a court should allow the use of pricing that would otherwise be condemned as “predatory”). See also, e.g., Foremost Pro Color, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co., 703 F.2d 534, 542-46 (9th Cir.1983), cert. denied, 465 U.S. 1038, 104 S.Ct. 1315, 79 L.Ed.2d 712 (1984) (a monopolist need not make essential technology available to a would-be competitor and need not articulate a good reason for withholding the technology).
There is, of course, another possibility: that a market with two firms is not a natural monopoly. The only way to tell whether a market is a natural monopoly is to see whether two firms can survive in it. Judges cannot readily compute cost functions. As a result, they ought not to abrogate antitrust rules just because one party cries “natural monopoly.” In Union Leader the market had two newspapers, and it is a good idea to use antitrust to protect that market structure, which aids consumers. Maybe the market could sustain competition over the long haul. This was also a possibility in Omega; the excluded competitor wanted to use a technology that required less wiring, and two technologies may coexist (or the excluded technology may prove to be superior). Application of the antitrust laws will let the customers choose. Here, however, there was and is only one pro basketball team; there was no rivalry to preserve for consumers’ benefit.
The cases I have examined, and the rest of the essential facility cases, fall into one of two categories: use of antitrust to preserve horizontal competition at a level other than the bottleneck (Otter Tail and Hecht) or the use of antitrust to preserve competition for the market (Omega and Union Leader). In each category, consumers’ interests are at stake. Here they are not. It is as if Rich and CPSC had blocking patents. CPSC could buy from Rich without offering its patent to IBI, although that would “exclude” IBI and make CPSC’s acquisition inevitable. So here; the essential facility doctrine is irrelevant.
My colleagues respond to this treatment of Otter Tail and the other essential facility cases that the opinions did not themselves draw the distinctions I have emphasized. True enough, but not important. A study of the majority opinion for four Justices in Otter Tail will not reveal the Court’s reason; it gave only a result. As my brethren emphasize, the majority did not reply to the dissent.3 It did not offer *574any reason other than to say that Otter Tail had reduced competition. But, as subsequent cases — BMI, NCAA, GTE Sylva-nia, Monsanto, Hyde, and many others— demonstrate, a simple “reduction in competition” is not now enough to support liability. To rely on Otter Tail my colleagues must be able to tease a reason out of a silent opinion. To decide what that 4-3 decision means today, after 15 years of intervening cases have emphasized the importance of demonstrating injury to consumers, we must go behind the surface and find out what was really at stake. What was at stake was a reduction in horizontal competition among generators of power. Having discovered this, we ought not impute to the four Justices in Otter Tail an unarticulated rationale that requires us to disregard subsequent developments in antitrust law.
As for Union Leader and the other appellate cases, I am as guilty of trying to rationalize them as I am of rationalizing Otter Tail. But I had supposed that this is one of a judge’s principal jobs. The holdings of decisions are more important than their language, especially for decisions such as Union Leader. When that case was decided in 1960, the premises being articulated by the Supreme Court were different from those in use today. “Opinion about the offense of monopolization has undergone an evolution.” Olympia, 797 F.2d at 375. I have discussed (at 573) several of the cases that washed away the foundations of the rhetoric in Union Leader. The majority does not explain why it leans on an appellate decision from 1960 at the expense of developments in the Supreme Court and other courts, including ours, that affect the rationale (although not the holding) of Union Leader.
For what it is worth, I doubt that the Stadium was an essential facility in 1972. All of the essential facility cases involve natural monopolies. The least-cost way to serve all demand was with a single stadium (Hecht) or transmission grid {Otter Tail, Mishawaka, and Omega). If the antitrust laws allowed the owner of the facility to turn away users, there would be an incentive to wasteful duplication. Monopoly profits serve as a lure; the result would be inefficient. See Hecht, 570 F.2d at 992. Antitrust law does not relieve each would-be competitor of the need to build its own production facilities, if the market will support more than one. MCI Communications Corp. v. AT & T, 708 F.2d 1081, 1132-33 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 464 U.S. 891, 104 S.Ct. 234, 78 L.Ed.2d 226 (1983). The high cost of a facility does not make it “essential”. MCI built its own interstate phone lines at a cost of billions. We recently held that an entrant into the business of selling communications terminals had to hire its own sales force; it could not insist that an existing firm lend a hand. Olympia, 797 F.2d at 376-80, and the opinion denying rehearing, 802 F.2d 217 (1986). And if John DeLorean wants to get back into the business of building aluminum cars with gull-wing doors, he will have to build his own plant, even though that is time-consuming and expensive. See Reisner v. General Motors Corp., 671 F.2d 91 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 858, 103 S.Ct. 130, 74 L.Ed.2d 112 (1982).
We know that the market for large indoor arenas in Chicago is not a natural monopoly. The Rosemont Horizon, built after 1972, is packed with basketball and hockey games (including college and high school), concerts, circuses, rodeos, ice shows, tennis tournaments, track meets, indoor soccer, and other events. Fishman could have built the Horizon or contracted to be its prime tenant. The majority’s observation (maj. op. at 540) that $19 million is a lot of money, more than the initial cost of the Bulls (though certainly not more than the ongoing cost of running the Bulls) is irrelevant; a new arena would have had more tenants than the Bulls. The observation is like saying that if DeLorean wants to build only 1,000 cars a year, it is “uneconomic” to build a new plant, and therefore General Motors must build DeLorean’s cars for him. Antitrust law requires nothing of the sort. A stadium is the place in *575which sporting contests are “manufactured.” A would-be manufacturer cannot hire a crew of employees (the team) and demand that someone else supply the plant. The Chicago Symphony owns its auditorium, as new airlines buy or lease their own planes (for a lot more than $19 million). The building of new arenas and stadia to attract teams is common. Often the building is put up by a third party to lure a professional team as the anchor tenant; the owner makes money from other events as well. The New Jersey Giants and the Foxboro Patriots are testimony to the willingness to build; perhaps the Addison White Sox will join the list one day.
Too, in 1972 the Stadium was in competition with the International Amphitheatre. The Amphitheatre was IBI’s first choice. That is where the Bulls played until forced (by the burning of McCormick Place) to move to the Stadium. Fishman testified that he thought the Amphitheatre “as good a place or better” than the Stadium. Fish-man leased the Amphitheatre without asking the Stadium for terms. Had CPSC crawled into a hole as soon as IBI and Rich signed the contract, IBI would have acquired the Bulls and played the 1972-73 season at the Amphitheatre. The Stadium became “essential” only after CPSC convinced six or seven owners of NBA teams, a minority, that the Stadium was preferable. According to the district court, the Stadium became “essential” as soon as a blocking minority within the NBA insisted on it. CPSC’s strategy backfired; their lobbying to get the team — lawful lobbying, my colleagues say — turned the Stadium into an essential facility. This is not an economic definition of “essential”; it does not even show that the Stadium was preferable (a majority of the NBA’s owners voted to take IBI and the Amphitheatre). This is a political rather than an economic definition, which undermines the court’s own holding that lobbying to a league is permissible.
IV
The majority concludes that there is a per se violation of § 1 as well as a violation of § 2. If the conduct really is illegal per se, the court’s discussion about market power and anticompetitive consequences becomes a sidelight, for a per se theory dispenses with such things. On a per se approach, a whole category of conduct— here, failure to help one’s rival — becomes illegal. The § 1 claim in the district court was based on a conspiracy among NBA owners, as well as a conspiracy between CPSC and the NBA. The court today holds that the NBA’s acts were lawful. That should doom the § 1 theory.
My colleagues say that the failure to lease the Stadium is a per se violation because “there was no arguable procom-petitive justification” (maj. op. 541) for the failure to lease the Stadium. The defendants did not articulate a justification, but Part I of this opinion establishes one. This justification is more than “arguable”; it has the unanimous support of scholars. My colleagues’ position amounts to saying that whenever a plaintiff brings an antitrust suit, defendants who cannot justify their conduct automatically lose. Quite the contrary, the plaintiff has the burden of showing that the conduct is harmful. In the event of equipoise the defendant wins. The per se rule, in contrast, is reserved for activities that “always or almost always tend to restrict competition and decrease output”, BMI v. CBS, 441 U.S. at 19-20, 99 S.Ct. at 1562 (emphasis added). The defendant’s neglect to establish efficiencies in a given case does not show that the category of conduct meets the standard for per se illegality. In two recent cases the Court has declined to apply the per se label to horizontal boycotts. FTC v. Indiana Federation of Dentists, — U.S.-, 106 S.Ct. 2009, 2017-18, 90 L.Ed.2d 445 (1986); Northwest Wholesale Stationers, supra. There is a much better argument that horizontal boycotts “restrict competition and decrease output” than that the acts in this case do so.
The per se holding in this case is a throwback to the Pick-Barth doctrine. See Albert Pick-Barth Co. v. Mitchell Woodbury Co., 57 F.2d 96 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 286 U.S. 552, 52 S.Ct. 503, 76 L.Ed. 1288 (1932). *576For many years business torts were treated as unlawful per se on the majority’s rationale: they are “anticompetitive”, and there is no “arguable procompetitive justification” for them. If a firm blew up its rival’s plant, or rigged the bidding so that buyers stopped purchasing its rival’s goods, or got a trade group to deem the rival’s product “unsafe”, a court would treat this as illegal per se. More than a decade ago the First Circuit, which decided Pick-Bartk, abandoned the per se treatment. George R. Whitten, Jr., Inc. v. Paddock Pool Builders, Inc., 508 F.2d 547 (1st Cir.1974). We have done likewise, holding in Havoco, 626 F.2d at 554-56, and in Juneau Square Corp. v. First Wisconsin National Bank, 624 F.2d 798, 812-13 (7th Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 1013, 101 S.Ct. 571, 66 L.Ed.2d 472 (1980), that per se analysis is inappropriate when the nature of the claim is “unfair competition”. The majority has restored Pick-Bartk as the rule of this circuit without so much as a sidelong glance at the experience that has led every other court of appeals to abandon per se treatment of “unfair competition” and related business torts. E.g., Northwest Power Products, Inc. v. Omark Industries, Inc., 576 F.2d 83 (5th Cir.1978), cert. denied, 439 U.S. 1116, 99 S.Ct. 1021, 59 L.Ed.2d 75 (1979).
The majority’s implicit answer is that ours is a “conspiracy” to commit a business tort. It is not clear why the “conspiracy” should change the analysis here any more than in Indiana Federation of Dentists and Northwest Wholesale Stationers, both of which involved horizontal agreements. My colleagues do not view the agreement among several actors as the reason why the withholding of the lease became anti-competitive; in the majority’s view, the acts would be equally anticompetitive if CPSC were the only actor. So the majority’s approach amounts to saying that whenever a plurality of actors do something that is evaluated under the Rule of Reason if done by one actor, then per se analysis applies. The court does not cite any case for this proposition, and in light of Indiana Federation of Dentists, Northwest Wholesale Stationers, and other recent cases it is untenable. E.g., Marrese v. American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, 726 F.2d 1150, 1155 (7th Cir.1984) (en banc), rev’d on other grounds, 470 U.S. 373, 105 S.Ct. 1327, 84 L.Ed.2d 274 (1985), holding that when particular conduct is not unlawful per se, a boycott entailing the same conduct is not unlawful per se either.
There is a further problem, independently dispositive. A § 1 conspiracy requires a plurality of actors. My colleagues conclude that CPSC and the Chicago Stadium Corp. (CSC) are the conspirators. Slip op. 35 n. 19. Yet the substantive theory of liability is that these two are “the same”— that they have a single interest, which is why CSC had to offer the Stadium to IBI. If CPSC and CSC were distinct, there could be no objection to CSC’s choice of lessee. This case therefore comes within the principle of Copperweld Corp. v. Independence Tube Corp., 467 U.S. 752, 769, 104 S.Ct. 2731, 2741, 81 L.Ed.2d 628 (1984), that two corporations in joint control cannot “conspire” for purposes of § 1.
Copperweld holds that a firm cannot conspire with its subsidiary. CPSC is not a subsidiary of CSC, but they have common investors and are under common control. Copperweld dealt with a wholly-owned subsidiary, but its rationale is that § 1 should be applied only to those agreements that bring formerly independent economic actors into a common plan. 467 U.S. at 768-69, 104 S.Ct. at 2740-41. CPSC and CSC never have been independent economic actors. Our case therefore is governed by Century Oil Tool, Inc. v. Production Specialties, Inc., 737 F.2d 1316 (5th Cir.1984), which applies Copperweld to hold that two corporations under common control are not independent actors for purposes of § 1. CPSC and CSC are under common control. They cannot be guilty of “conspiring”. See VII Areeda, Antitrust Law UK 1466a, 1467. That the overlap of investment is not complete is irrelevant; “control” is what matters for purposes of Copperweld, and my colleagues do not deny that CPSC and CSC have never been operated separately. The existence of some people who have invested in one corporation but not the other is *577irrelevant, when these investors do not control (or even influence) either corporation. There is therefore no basis under Copper-weld for a finding of conspiracy.
Ultimately this case is about the definition of competition. Does competition mean moment-to-moment rivalry, or is competition instead a process that produces benefits for consumers? See Bork at 58-61. My colleagues fix on competition as rivalry to buy the team, without asking whether this rivalry has anything to do with price and output in an appropriate market. The market the court defines is pro basketball in Chicago; price and output there are unaffected.
My brethren want rivalry to be “fair”. CPSC should have taken no for an answer on June 14. Who says that competition is supposed to be fair, that we judge the behavior of the marketplace by the ethics of the courtroom? Real competition is bruising rivalry, in which people go out of business under intense pressure. See Mat-sushita, 106 S.Ct. at 1360, and Ball, 784 F.2d at 1338-39. In the words of Joseph Schumpeter, competition is a “gale of creative destruction.” Antitrust law properly is suspicious of cooperation among rivals. Today the court holds that antitrust law requires cooperation among rivals — friendly, considerate cooperation at that.
Claims that competition should be “fair” are the staples of trade associations, which plead with their members not to harm (meaning, compete against) their fellow businessmen. Everyone has a family to support; let us be peaceful rivals. This is the siren song of the cartel. Real competition is dastardly. “Unfair” competition is still competition, too ruthless for someone’s sensibilities. When economic pressure must give way to fair conduct, as the court today holds it must, rivals will trim their sails. Fair competition is tempered competition. To say that conduct is unlawful because it bruised a rival producer — even though it did not hurt and probably helped consumers — is to put the Blue Eagle of the National Recovery Administration on the banner of the Sherman Act. It is to turn antitrust law on its head.
V
The court reverses most of the awards based on state law, and it eliminates punitive damages. I concur with these decisions. What remain are awards of actual damages against the non-NBA defendants under the tort of interference with prospective economic advantage. My colleagues recognize that competition is privileged, which is why low prices are not tortious. But it concludes that a violation of the antitrust laws eliminates the competitive privilege. Thus the violation of the Sherman Act is the basis of the award of damages under state law.
Usually things work the other way ’round. Courts take business torts as the fount of antitrust liability. Here, in contrast, my colleagues conclude that but for the violation of the Sherman Act there would be no tort. I have not found a case in Illinois or any other state that used the Sherman Act as a basis of tort liability. Piggybacking in this fashion serves no purpose. Damages are trebled under the Sherman Act, and the tort award is not cumulative. From one perspective, who cares? From another, why would we expect Illinois law to provide duplicative awards of Vs of the federal award?
More, the antitrust violation here is a failure to lease the Stadium to IBI. In Illinois, as in other states, each firm is privileged to refuse to help its rivals. Liability on account of failure to assist a business rival is unheard of, yet that is the foundation of liability here, and it is a bad idea for the reasons explored in Olympia, 797 F.2d at 379-80, and the opinion denying rehearing. 802 F.2d 217. It is tortious to blow up a rival’s ship on its way to pick up goods, but it is privileged to refuse to charter your boat to a rival in need, even if refusal to charter to your rival means that you can carry the goods yourself at a premium. See Mogul S.S. Co. v. McGregor, Gow & Co., [1892] A.C. 25. Duties to assist would make assets less valuable (you could not use them when they had a special value), and so people would acquire fewer productive assets; duties to assist would lead firms to alter their conduct so as to be unable to assist their rivals (and thus free *578themselves from a duty), even if the alteration should be inefficient. No Illinois case I have found creates a duty to assist one’s rival by renting it an asset — essential or otherwise. See also Restatement (Second) of Torts § 766 comment 1; Brown, The Right to Refuse to Sell, 25 Yale L.J. 194 (1916); Prosser & Keeton, The Law of Torts 1012-13, 1024 (5th ed. 1984). It is problematic to interpret Illinois law as creating a duty of cooperation in the name of antitrust, which usually frowns on cooperation among rivals.
VI
When an antitrust violation knocks a firm out of a market, its remedy is the profit it lost. E.g., Zenith Radio Corp. v. Hazeltine Research, Inc., 395 U.S. 100, 124-25, 89 S.Ct. 1562, 1577, 23 L.Ed.2d 129 (1969). Suggestions that all damages awards be based on the overcharge to consumers, e.g., William M. Landes, Optimal Sanctions for Antitrust Violations, 50 U.Chi.L.Rev. 652 (1983), have not yet been adopted. But we must compute what is lost — that is, the economic profit IBI could have made but did not because of the violation. Just as a person wrongly fired must take a new job and loses only the difference between the old salary and the new, just as a person aggrieved by a broken contract loses only the amount of the price difference between the contract price and the cover price, so a person excluded from a market by an antitrust violation loses only the difference in the profits of this opportunity and the next-best business opportunity.
When an antitrust violation forces a going concern out of the market, there are at least three kinds of loss. The entrepreneur loses the opportunity to make the best use of his skills. The firm loses the value of its sunk assets — the difference between the value of the assets to a going business and their value if put to some new employment. The firm also loses the full value of its assets for the time it takes to get into the new line of business. If the calculation is done right, these will sum up to the lost profit the firm experiences. There may be other losses, such as the lost opportunity to earn monopoly profits, but these are not compensable. See Brunswick v. Pueblo and Local Beauty v. LaMaur.
A firm that is prevented from purchasing productive assets has none of the usual losses. The entrepreneur can go on to other things. If these are equally remunerative, he loses nothing. The district court found that Fishman made more money running a real estate business than he would have made as president of the Bulls. He therefore suffered no loss and did not appeal on this score. IBI had neither sunk assets nor a period in which assets stood idle.
The most one can say is that IBI lost an opportunity to buy an asset. That imposes loss only if the price of the asset was a bargain. It is a bargain if the discounted expected cash flows from owning the team, after paying all costs, exceed the capital value of $3.3 million in 1972. It should not make any difference whether we look directly for a bargain or compute (and discount) the cash flows; the result is the same, and the process is identical to the one used to generate awards in tort cases. See Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. v. Pfeifer, 462 U.S. 523, 533-52, 103 S.Ct. 2541, 2548-58, 76 L.Ed.2d 768 (1983); Nemmers v. United States, 795 F.2d 628, 633-34 (7th Cir.1986); O’Shea v. Riverway Towing Co., 677 F.2d 1194, 1199-1201 (7th Cir.1982). The majority agrees with me (maj. op. 552) that capital loss and lost profits usually are the same. The capital value is the value of the profit stream. That equation is the basis of the majority’s election to look at the profit stream, the better to compensate IBI for actual loss by reference to actual experience.
The problem is that IBI isn’t an ordinary entrant. In most frustrated-entry cases, the putative entrant planned to buy some widely-sold items at their market price and go into business. A would-be maker of widgets rents a plant, buys the parts, hires labor, and sets to work. IBI, however, did not plan to make or build a basketball team. It wanted to buy an existing team. To buy, IBI had to compensate Rich for the expected profits Rich was giving up. Un*579less the Bulls were underpriced (the owner was not selling the team for the value of the profits), IBI suffered no loss even if the Bulls were highly profitable.
Rich put the Bulls up for bid. He attracted three bids around $3.3 million. The value of a thing is what people will pay for it. There is no hint that IBI viewed the Bulls as a bargain at $3.3 million. If IBI could have turned around and sold the Bulls in 1972 for $5 million, then its damages would have been $1.7 million, tripled, plus interest (see Part VII below). But there was no visible bargain element, no reason why Rich would have sold the team for less than it was worth. This was not an “unusually successful investment” (maj. op. at 553). The surprise is that the team fetched $3.3 million. If the Stadium was really an essential facility, then it had the power to extract all the profits in the market by charging a monopoly rent, leaving the owner of the Bulls with little or nothing. A legal monopolist may charge what the traffic will bear. Berkey Photo, Inc. v. Eastman Kodak Co., 603 F.2d 263, 294 (2d Cir.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1093, 100 S.Ct. 1061, 62 L.Ed.2d 783 (1980); cf. Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission v. NFL, 791 F.2d 1356, 1366-75 (9th Cir. 1986). This element of value therefore belonged to the Stadium all along. (Of course, the fact that the Bulls had a substantial capital value may indicate that the Stadium was not a bottleneck.) The best guess is that the Bulls were worth what the bidders were offering. Fishman and IBI therefore lost no bargain element, no unique opportunity, in 1972, and they have no damages.4
My brethren reply that recoveries ought to be based on actual rather than hypothetical calculations (maj. op. at 552). Now actual calculations are much better than hypothetical ones, but a calculation based on actual bids is an actual number. Bids on the table establish the value of a lost business opportunity. As in condemnation cases proof of offers by willing buyers trumps calculations based on cash flows, cf. In re Chicago, M. St.P. & P. R.R., 799 F.2d 317, 324 (7th Cir.1986), so here actual bids should trump cash flow computations. The cash flow computations are larded with estimates and hypothetical calculations, inevitably so. IBI’s cost of capital, and the opportunity cost of IBI’s and CPSC’s capital, are unknowns. We cannot know them because, among other things, CPSC lent money to itself. Changing the estimates by even a few percentage points will double or wipe out the damages. Computations of value based on cash flows are notoriously malleable; we have mocked them because of their imprecision. E.g., Metlyn Realty Corp. v. Esmark, Inc., 763 F.2d 826, 834-36 (7th Cir.1985); cf. Olympia, 797 F.2d at 382-83. The majority ultimately is “forced to hypothesize” (maj. op. at 558) IBI’s cost of capital, on which most of its recovery depends. All the more reason to compute damages based on actual bids— they are the only real numbers, lost profits being judicial reconstructions.
The award of lost profits here is based on the proposition that CPSC’s gain is IBI’s loss. All the “profits” refer to CPSC’s operating results. There would be an identity of gain and loss if CPSC’s costs of doing business were computed accurately and subtracted from the cash flows, and if all elements of value attributable to CPSC’s efforts were stripped from the computation. They have not been, however, and there lies the difference in the valuations produced by the two processes. There are several principal sources of differences.
1. Suppose the whole NBA did better than people expected in 1972. Then the owner of the Bulls would realize profits; the price of $3.3 million would turn out to be a bargain. There is some evidence of this in the prices of comparable franchises, which increased through the decade of the 1970s. This, however, is a gain to CPSC *580not matched by a loss to IBI, which could have purchased one of these franchises and participated in the upturn. This is related to cover in a contract case. One who is disappointed by a failure of his seller to deliver must cover if he wants to participate in the market. See UCC §§ 2-711(l)(a), 2-712, 2-713. He cannot sit on the sidelines, hoping that if the price rises he will get damages, and if the price falls he will avoid a loss.5 To get the market reward for risk-taking, he must take risk. His damages are limited to the difference between the contract and market prices, whether he covers or not. IBI’s proof that other comparable franchises were sold shows that it could have covered. It is not entitled to any element of value created by a general rise in the market for pro basketball teams. (Of course, if the other opportunities are not comparable, IBI could not have covered, but the sales of other teams should not have been used as benchmarks to compute IBI’s damages, either.)
2. Suppose the Bulls did better than the rest of the league. In that event we must determine why. If the difference is random, or caused by factors peculiar to Chicago, then CPSC’s gain does match IBI’s loss. But if the abnormal team-specific gain came from entrepreneurial efforts of CPSC, then there is no match. IBI might not have produced these gains. CPSC, its owners and employees are entitled to compensation for their efforts; this includes compensation for extraordinary entrepreneurial gains, just as it includes hourly wages for floor sweepers. CPSC is entitled to keep any gains of this sort (although there do not appear to be any).
3. Suppose the Bulls appeared profitable because of bookkeeping transfers. Because CPSC and the Stadium were under common control, the Stadium had no incentive to drive hard bargains for rental. It made no difference whether the money appeared on CPSC’s books or the Stadium’s. (This is not quite right because the ownership of the two differed somewhat, but the principle holds nonetheless.) A lower rent means higher "profits” for the Bulls. But again CPSC’s gain is not IBI’s loss. If IBI had owned the team, the Stadium would have bargained with it at arms’ length. CPSC or the Stadium is entitled to keep any “profit” that appeared on CPSC’s books because of a rent lower than the maximum the Stadium could have negotiated.
4. Suppose the accounting profit on the Bulls’ books includes items that are real costs of doing business — costs IBI also would have borne. This is what the “opportunity cost” and interest rate calculations are about. Capital must be hired, just like labor or any other input. It may be hired on the market (borrowed) or hired out of other uses the investors have (diverted). If CPSC had hired capital at 15% interest from a bank, the interest would have been an explicit cost of doing business. So if in 1975 CPSC had $10 million of a bank’s money in use, it would have paid $1.5 million in return. This would have been subtracted from its income before a computation of profits.
What actually happened is that CPSC’s investors supplied most of the money. They want to pay themselves for this money at the rate lenders charged for risky, arms’ length investments. This is how “opportunity cost” has been used — the amount of the Bulls’ income that is assigned as the “cost of capital” and subtracted from profits. If the investors had $10 million in the Bulls in 1975, they say, they are entitled to 15 or 20% return. The district court, on the other hand, allowed them only the rate of interest the United States was paying on Treasury Bills at the time. This risk-free rate was much lower than the rate paid to investors in high-risk businesses. So to keep the figures simple, in 1975 the district court allowed only $500,000 as the cost of capital, while CPSC says the allowance should have been $1.5 million. The differ*581ence between the risky rate of interest and the safe, T-Bill rate accounts for more than the entire award of lost profits in this case.
The district court’s choice of rate was mistaken. The rate allowed to CPSC’s investors should be almost the same rate that a bank would have charged to CPSC. Any supplier of capital is entitled to compensation, and the Bulls’ full cost of capital must appear in the damages calculations as a subtraction.
If CPSC had hired all of its capital from banks or outside investors, the rate would have been very high. CPSC suggests a rate of prime plus 3%, which seems favorable to the plaintiffs. Sports teams are risky ventures. Part of their value lies in publicity for the owners and tax advantages. These elements of value cannot be used to secure the loan, so the outside investors must charge a higher rate to compensate. Banks might accept lower rates if the investors guarantee the loan with their other assets (as investors in both groups did), but the guarantee has opportunity costs of its own because assets used to secure this loan cannot be used to finance some other venture. Because the use of personal assets creates an opportunity cost that offsets the reduction in the rate of interest, the correct rate is the one the bank will charge without personal guarantees.6 This will turn out to be high, reflecting the risk of sports, the illiquidity of the assets, and the personal consumption value of ownership. The opportunity cost incurred by the owners in holding their own capital in the business is less than the rate a bank would have charged for a loan, because the owners get the recognition and tax benefits. But risk alone will make the opportunity cost high. The upshot of even a moderate opportunity cost for CPSC’s capital, as the district court recognized, is no or low damages. The award of damages in this case is an artifact of the district court’s assumption that the opportunity cost of CPSC’s capital was the rate available on T-Bills, a riskless investment. It is a fantastic assumption. It has nothing to do with business reality or the economics of determining profits. The court properly reverses the use of the T-Bill rate, and although I think prime plus one-half percent is too low, it is a great improvement.
To put this somewhat differently, CPSC’s owners supplied a service, much as labor is a service: risk-bearing. They are entitled to be paid for this service, which means that the value of the risk-bearing must be subtracted from CPSC’s accounting profits. Gains resulting from defendants’ efforts always are subtracted in computing lost profits. Siebel v. Scott, 725 F.2d 995, 1002 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 467 U.S. 1242, 104 S.Ct. 3515, 82 L.Ed.2d 823 (1984); Janigan v. Taylor, 344 F.2d 781, 787 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 382 U.S. 879, 86 S.Ct. 163, 15 L.Ed.2d 120 (1965). If CPSC had been a regulated utility under a profit constraint, it would have been allowed to subtract the market, risky rate of capital as an opportunity cost to determine whether it was making a profit. E.g., Illinois Commerce Commission v. ICC, 776 F.2d 355, 362-64 (D.C.Cir.1985) (Scalia, J.); City of Charlottesville v. FERC, 774 F.2d 1205, 1213-23 (D.C.Cir.1985) (Scalia, J.), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 1515, 89 L.Ed.2d 914 (1986). This shows why opportunity cost here, too, goes into the computation of profit. It is not properly an item of “mitigation” — an analogy that has led my brethren to look at IBI’s opportunities rather than CPSC’s true costs.
Had IBI owned the Bulls, it would have supplied the risk-bearing service for itself. It did not, and it did not lose anything as a result. Payment for bearing risk is not a profit of any sort. It is simply a cost of *582doing business. Players’ salaries were subtracted from the Bulls’ income to get its profits; the implicit expense of risk-bearing also must be subtracted. IBI was of course free to bear risk if it wanted. It could have bought another pro sports team, or gone into another (risky) line of business. Then it could have reaped any rewards from bearing risk, but it didn’t.
My colleagues say that the district court on remand should “err on the side of conservatism” (maj. op. 559) because it is not appropriate to demand that IBI take substantial risks to mitigate its damages. This is where the choice between capital as a cost to CPSC and as an opportunity for IBI to reinvest has its bite. I agree with my colleagues that if this is a problem in “mitigation” the district court should be conservative. A disappointed bidder need not mitigate by taking risks greater than those it had planned to take if it purchased the assets. But it is not a problem in mitigation. We are simply trying to calculate CPSC’s true “profits,” net of its full costs of doing business. IBI gets the profits, trebled. The opportunity cost is a real cost. It is the largest difference between CPSC’s gain and IBI’s loss.
To sum up: The right way to compute damages is to determine the bargain element, if there was one, of which IBI was deprived in 1972. There was none, so there should be no damages. If damages are to be computed from discounting cash flows, however, the calculation of the flows should use as the cost the interest CPSC would have paid, without guarantees, for all of its capital.7 Realistic cost computations also should allow CPSC to retain any elements of value that IBI could have duplicated (such as value attributable to a general increase in the popularity of NBA basketball).
VII
The principle that we should compute damages to take account of the opportunity cost of money cuts both ways. It helps CPSC by requiring the use of a risky rate. It helps IBI by requiring the award of prejudgment interest. IBI was injured in 1972 (if we use a capitalization method) or throughout 1972-82 (if we use the district court’s method of computing profits lost year by year). In either event, a dollar paid in 1986 does not make up for a dollar lost in 1972 or 1982. “In the typical case an award of prejudgment interest is necessary to ensure that the [victim] is placed in as good a position as he would have been in” had the defendant complied with the law. General Motors Corp. v. Devex Corp., 461 U.S. 648, 655, 103 S.Ct. 2058, 2062, 76 L.Ed.2d 211 (1983) (holding that there is a presumption in favor of prejudgment interest under the patent laws). Interest “merely serves to make the [victim] whole, since his damages consist not only of the value of the [profits lost] but also of the forgone use of the money”. 461 U.S. at 656,103 S.Ct. at 2062. See also Waite v. United States, 282 U.S. 508, 509, 51 S.Ct. 227, 227, 75 L.Ed. 494 (1931) (presumption in favor of prejudgment interest in patent law); Jacobs v. United States, 290 U.S. 13, 54 S.Ct. 26, 78 L.Ed. 142 (1933) (prejudgment interest is an essential ingredient of “just compensation” under the fifth amendment because necessary to make the private party whole). Cases in this circuit after Devex regularly award prejudgment interest when the statute in question is silent. E.g., Hunter v. Allis-Chalmers Corp., 797 F.2d 1417, 1425-27 (7th Cir. 1986) (employment discrimination under 42 U.S.C. § 1981); City of Chicago v. Department of Labor, 753 F.2d 606, 608 (7th Cir.1985) (violations of 29 U.S.C. § 801). *583Prejudgment interest or some other method of compensating for the time value of money also is a staple ingredient in the computation of attorneys’ fees, see In re Fine Paper Antitrust Litigation, 751 F.2d 562, 588-89 (3d Cir.1984), unless the sovereign immunity of the government gets in the way, see Library of Congress v. Shaw, — U.S. -, 106 S.Ct. 2957, 92 L.Ed.2d 250 (1986). .
Sixteen years ago we analyzed the problem as follows: “Interest is not enumerated as a recoverable item in the statute, 15 U.S.C. § 15. Recovery of it is therefore precluded.” Locklin v. Day-Glo Color Corp., 429 F.2d 873, 877 (7th Cir.1970), cert. denied, 400 U.S. 1020, 91 S.Ct. 584, 27 L.Ed.2d 632 (1971). That is the whole analysis. Devex changes things — particularly its reference to cases such as Waite and Jacobs that permit or require the award of interest. We should overrule Locklin and adopt a presumption in favor of interest as the standard in this circuit.
The majority’s principal response relies on an amendment to the Clayton Act effective for cases filed after September 12, 1980. Section 4(a), 15 U.S.C. § 15(a), now provides that a district court should award interest on actual damages when the award is “just in the circumstances” and lists three things that the judge must consider to decide whether an award is “just”. This case was filed in 1974, so the statute does not apply. I appreciate my colleagues’ point that we could not sensibly award interest exceeding that allowed under § 4(a). Congress decided to withhold interest on amounts exceeding actual damages, interest that accrued before the complaint was filed, and interest that is not “just in the circumstances” (as defined by the criteria listed in the statute). A court construing a silent statute ought not read into the law a rule of decision that Congress has rejected. We therefore cannot accept IBI’s argument that it is entitled to interest on the whole sum from the beginning.
Section 4(a) does not preclude an award on actual damages starting in 1974, however, or on treble damages starting in 1982, when the district court made its decision on the merits. My colleagues’ reading of the 1980 amendment as forbidding an award of interest in cases filed before September 12, 1980, has no support. Certainly some members of Congress assumed that interest was unavailable; that assumption reflects an accurate reading of existing cases and is one reason why Congress passed a statute to provide for interest. Legislators’ assumptions about the meaning of antitrust law do not govern, however. An assumption by one Congress about the work of an earlier Congress is not the same as law. So Illinois Brick Co. v. Illinois, 431 U.S. 720, 97 S.Ct. 2061, 52 L.Ed.2d 707 (1977), construed § 4 of the Clayton Act as not authorizing recoveries by indirect purchasers, despite the concession (id. at 733 n. 14) that only the year before, when passing the parens patriae amendments to the Clayton Act, Congress had assumed that indirect purchasers may recover. Why is Congress’ assumption in 1980 about the meaning of § 4 binding on us, when its assumption in 1976 about the meaning of the same statute is not?
We should bring the law for pre-1980 cases into line with the rule that applies to cases filed later. All but one of the cases denying interest in antitrust actions predate this legislation, Devex, or both. The exception is Affiliated Capital Corp. v. City of Houston, 793 F.2d 706 (5th Cir. 1986) (en banc), which did not cite Devex or the 1980 amendment. Affiliated Capital also adopted a rule that the district and appellate courts have discretion to grant or deny interest from the date a judgment should have been entered. See also Hand-gards, Inc. v. Ethicon, Inc., 743 F.2d 1282, 1299-1300 (9th Cir.1984). Locklin does not even allow discretion.
Neither a count of judicial noses nor the observation that the Sherman Act was silent should obscure the fact that the time value of money works in defendants’ favor. Antitrust cases can be long-lived affairs. This one has lasted 14 years, 2V2 of which passed between the finding of liability and the award of damages. During all of the time, the defendants held the stakes and earned interest. If IBI had owned the *584Bulls, it would have possessed (and invested) the profits.8 To deny prejudgment interest is to allow the defendants to profit from their wrong, and because 14 years is a long time the profit may be substantial.
Is this small beer, to be made up by the trebling of the damages? Hardly. Any erosion of the trebling on account of a denial of interest undermines the deterrent force of the antitrust law. Trebling makes up for the fact that antitrust violations are hard to detect and prove. The acts of the defendants were easy to detect, but the court’s rule presumably applies in a cartel case as well. These may be detected only belatedly, and the denial of interest will make trebling much less useful in increasing the damages defendants expect to pay. The expected damages are the deterrent. Today’s decision reduces that deterrent. Suppose IBI was denied a “bargain” in 1972 worth, say, $1 million in the discounted present value of the flow of profits. The damages should be $1 million (or on the majority’s view, the profit flow worth $1 million when discounted to 1972 dollars, which is the same thing). One million dollars invested at 10% rate of return in 1972 would be worth $3.8 million in 1986 — more than $1 million trebled. If the cost of capital in the stock market is 15%, a plausible figure meaning that money invested (with dividends reinvested) grows at this rate, than $1 million in hand in 1972 would grow to $7.08 million in 1986. The trebling keeps pace with interest only when the rate is 8.16% per annum or less. (For example, at a rate of 5% the million grows to $1.98 million in 1986 and is exceeded by the $3 million trebled damages.) To turn this around, if the rate of return on investment is 10%, an award of a dollar today gives the plaintiffs only 26.3% of the damages they actually suffered; a trebled award gives them only 79% of their actual damages.
Of course, the way the district court computed damages, some were suffered as late as 1982. The effects of compound interest are less spectacular when the injury is so recent. But 10% compound interest for four years is substantial nonetheless. A million lost in 1982 would be worth $1.46 million in 1986, and if the rate is 15% (more realistic for available investments, considering that regulated utilities are allowed more than 10%) it would be worth $1.75 million. The denial of prejudgment interest systematically undercompen-sates victims and underdeters putative offenders. We should allow, indeed require, such awards.
VIII
I concur in the following portions of the opinion and the judgment: Part I.B (defining the, or at least a, market as professional basketball in Chicago); Part I.E (holding that the NBA’s rejection of IBI, and the lobbying that produced the rejection, did not violate the antitrust laws); Part I.F (to the extent it holds that the defendants did not commit the tort of interference with contractual relations and that the NBA defendants did not commit the tort of interference with prospective economic advantage); Part II.C.2 (to the extent it holds that the district court must recompute damages using a more appropriate measure of opportunity cost, although I do not entirely agree with the majority’s preferred measure); Part II.D (reversing the award of punitive damages under state law); Part II.E (holding the Estate of Arthur Wirtz liable for any treble damages appropriately awarded); and Part II.F.2 (affirming the district court’s denial of equitable relief). I remain dubitante about the finding of tort liability based on interference with prospective economic advantage. I dissent from the remainder of the decision. I would hold that the defendants did not violate the Sherman Act; that if they did, IBI has not established that it lost any profits; and that if IBI has shown lost profits, it is entitled to interest on its actual damages from the filing of the complaint to 1982, and to interest on the whole award from 1982 to date.
*585The court has produced two long opinions, but for all that it is a simple case. Antitrust law is designed to enhance the welfare of consumers and the efficiency of the economy as a whole. It requires rigorous competition. Today the court uses antitrust to protect the welfare of a competit- or at the potential expense of consumers. Instead of requiring rigorous competition, the court wants “fair” (meaning tempered) competition. This case should have been resolved with the simple principle at the beginning of this opinion: unless the plaintiff can make out a plausible case of consumers’ injury, actual or potential, now or tomorrow, there is no antitrust problem. Ours is a business tort in antitrust clothing. Copperweld told us to kick out of federal court “private state tort suits masquerading as antitrust actions.” 467 U.S. at 777, 104 S.Ct. at 2745. The majority holds that there is not even a business tort, at least not one independent of the antitrust violation. The lack of any claim of injury to consumers enabled us to dispose of this case in a jiffy. I regret that we took a long road to the wrong destination.
ORDER
The parties have advised us that they have settled this case and they jointly move for an order “vacating the appeal and cross-appeal” and remanding for the entry of orders effectuating their settlement. To the extent that the parties might be asking us to vacate our opinion of November 21,1987, supra p. 520, we decline to do so. Vacation of prior orders is appropriate when mootness bars the opportunity for complete review, United States v. Munsingwear, Inc., 340 U.S. 36, 39, 71 S.Ct. 104, 106, 95 L.Ed. 36 (1950), but a case does not become moot because parties voluntarily abandon their rights to further review.
In all other respects, the joint motion is granted. The petition for rehearing is DISMISSED, and this case is REMANDED to the district court for implementation of the settlement including dismissal of these lawsuits if appropriate. Each side shall bear its own costs in this court. The mandate shall issue seven days from the date hereof.

. Although the majority is right to point out that a patent does not always create a monopoly, or even market power, the court in Riegel assumed that the patent in question created an absolute monopoly.

. Whether it would work is an open question. See Richard Schmalensee, The Control of Natural Monopolies 68-73 (1979); Oliver E. Williamson, Franchise Bidding for Natural Monopolies— In General and with Respect to CATV, 7 Bell J.Econ. 73 (1976).

. The majority writes as if I were making the dissent’s points in Otter Tail, so that the majority’s failure to respond somehow refutes me. The dissenting Justices were arguing that Otter Tail should not be held liable. I am trying to find out why Otter Tail was held liable. My *574approach supplies a coherent reason. That the majority in Otter Tail did not offer a reason for its own decision hardly shows that I am wrong.

. Part of the value of a team is publicity for the owner and tax advantages for the investors. Part of the $3.3 million price compensated Rich for surrendering these benefits of ownership. The district court said that it was awarding Fishman and IBI nothing for the lost publicity and tax benefits. The implication is that the value of the profit stream expected from the Bulls was less than $3.3 million. The price was therefore not a bargain; it was a premium.

. There is a related problem of selection bias. Plaintiffs sue only when the price rises. If defendants must pay the full value when the price goes up, but swallow their losses when the price falls, then on average they expect to pay more than their gains: sometimes they pay the plaintiffs, sometimes they pay through business losses. Then defendants as a group are penalized more than their expected profits from the violation; there is too much deterrence.

. To put this a little differently, banks lent to CPSC, with guarantees, for prime plus one-half percent because if CPSC had gone belly up the guarantees would have made the banks whole. If CPSC had failed no one was going to make its investors whole; their risk (and the appropriate rate of interest) was therefore the same as the banks would have demanded without the guarantees.

. The majority observes that by 1975 CPSC’s lenders released the guarantees. But by 1975 CPSC’s investors had a great deal of equity in the venture. This equity was the debt investors’ "cushion”, enabling them to charge lower rates. (Releasing a guarantee is one way to lower the rate.) CPSC’s cost of capital includes the cost of all of its capital, debt and equity alike, just as a utility’s cost of capital looks at all sources of capital. "Opportunity cost” refers to the implicit cost of the equity investment in CPSC. That cost always exceeds the price the banks charged for their safer debt investments. (The interest actually paid to banks is subtracted as an actual expense of the corporation and plays no role in the opportunity cost adjustment.)

. A plaintiff is effectively investing his antitrust damages with the defendant, so the right rate of interest is the one defendant pays to banks for its own capital. This rate compensates for the possibility of nonpayment plus the value of delay. The risk may be less than the risk of a single venture, because the defendants are diversified, so the rate appropriately would be somewhat less than the opportunity cost of CPSC's money.