L.A. Liberty

“Since outright grants of monopoly or quasi monopoly would usually be considered baldly injurious to the public, governments have discovered a variety of methods of granting such privileges indirectly, as well as a variety of arguments to justify these measures. But they all have the effects common to monopoly or quasi-monopoly grants and monopoly prices when these are obtained.

“The important types of monopolistic grants (monopoly and quasi monopoly) are as follows: (1) governmentally enforced cartels which every firm in an industry is compelled to join; (2) virtual cartels imposed by the government, such as the production quotas enforced by American agricultural policy; (3) licenses, which require meeting government rules before a man or a firm is permitted to enter a certain line of production, and which also require the payment of a fee—a payment that serves as a penalty tax on smaller firms with less capital, which are thereby debarred from competing with larger firms; (4) “quality” standards, which prohibit competition by what the government (not the consumers) defines as “lower-quality” products; (5) tariffs and other measures that levy a penalty tax on competitors outside a given geographical region; (6) immigration restrictions, which prohibit the competition of laborers, as well as entrepreneurs, who would otherwise move from another geographical region of the world market; (7) child labor laws, which prohibit the labor competition of workers below a certain age; (8) minimum wage laws, which, by causing the unemployment of the least value-productive workers, remove their competition from the labor markets; (9) maximum hour laws, which force partial unemployment on those workers who are willing to work longer hours; (10) compulsory unionism, such as the Wagner-Taft-Hartley Act imposes, causing unemployment among the workers with the least seniority or the least political influence in their union; (11) conscription, which forces many young men out of the labor force; (12) any sort of governmental penalty on any form of industrial or market organization, such as antitrust laws, special chain store taxes, corporate income taxes, laws closing businesses at specific hours or outlawing pushcart peddlers or door-to-door salesmen; (13) conservation laws, which restrict production by force; (14) patents, where independent later discoverers of a process are debarred from entering a field production.”