Response to Barr’s Comments

• Author: William J. Curran
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X16641237
• Published date: 01 June 2016
• Date: 01 June 2016

Article

Response to Barr’s Comments

William J. Curran III*

Alan Barr

1

shares one of my concerns—wealth inequality. And although he writes that wealth inequal-

ity is serious, his greatest fear is not it or a threatened democracy. It is antitrust’s repeal.

I don’t fear repeal. Then, again, I see many things differently from Barr. He sees competition and its

complements—lower prices, better products, and more efficient production—benefitting all Ameri-

cans, while I see wealthy Americans benefitting the most with their wealth having an explosive impact

on inequalities. Barr sees industrial trusts reborn, while I see great wealth and huge corporate con-

solidations already commingled. He sees cartels strangling America, while I see industries already

concentrated with little competition. He sees antitrust controlling corporate power, while I see power

already created by the great wealth that Barr would shelter from antitrust challenge. He sees price-

fixing conspiracies as more serious and costly than the trillions in dollars that divide Americans, while

I see those trillions causing Americans far greater harm than antitrust could relieve through lower

prices or better products. More than repeal, it is wealth’s gross inequality and the wealth that antitrust

contributes and capitalism distributes that Barr should fear.

Barr fears other things that I don’t, like democratic equality. But I never proposed strict equality. I

proposed corrective legislative action sufficient to stem increases in wealth’s inequality while selec-

tively reversing adverse distributional consequences. Certainly, democracy requires something more

for the bottom 80%of Americans, and something less for the top 20%. How much or how little is not as

important as first acknowledging the huge degree to which America’s wealth deviates from an equality

norm. And since America’s wealth deviates to the point where 20%owns almost 90%, it is inequality

not equality that Barr should fear. Whether America is more oligarchic than democratic is the fear of

many—if not Barr.

Barr does not fear for democracy unlike prominent scholars and politicians. Piketty sees grossly

unequal wealth threatening America’s democracy—a fear shared by 2016 Democratic presidential

candidates. A coalition might move Congress. For now, however, Congress and the Supreme Court

follow wealth’s ideologies, not understanding that more wealth will generate more inequality threa-

tening democracy more. And since wealth inequality con tinues to rise, what could be next? Can

*The Antitrust Bulletin, Wexford, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

William J. Curran III, The Antitrust Bulletin, Wexford, PA, USA.

Email: bcurran3@comcast.net

1. See Alan Barr, Comment on William J. Curran III’s Commitment and Betrayal: Contradictions in American Democracy,

Capitalism, and Antitrust Laws,XXA

NTITRUST BULL. X (2016, this issue).

The Antitrust Bulletin

2016, Vol. 61(2) 262-263

ªThe Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/0003603X16641237

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