Anti-Trust critcism misplaced

David Bernstein makes what amounts to an aside, so this amounts to nothing more than a quibble. In a general criticism of anti-trust law, he attributes obe cause of anti-trust action to demogogery and cites Teddy Roosevelt. The achievement of Roosevelt is this: In a situation where the struggle was between unfettered capitalism and syndicalism, Roosevelt found a comprimise solution to eliminate the possibility of a syndicalist victory. His nephew later did much the same thing in so much as FDR's programs prevented worse. Its nice to criticize anti-trust legislation in the abstract, but given the observed fact that Democrats largely don't even bother to nod in the direction of free markets any more. If Republicans seriously started talking about ditching anti-trust legislation it would tend to "prove" the worst fears of the Left. The result would probabaly be sufficient to put anti-market forces in charge of the goverment. I argue that ineffeciencies like anti-trust, and I accept all of Bernstein's claims about them, are the price we pay to avoid the loss of control to those who would put a lower priority on market effeciency than they do for equity, enviromental impact, or other values that would substantially kill the goose. This means that Bernstein's post amounts to an "assume we have a can-opener" kind of speculation into ideal worlds that is utopian.