It may seem strange to the reader that one of the most important governmental checks on efficient competition, and therefore grants of quasi monopolies, are the antitrust laws. Very few, whether economists or others, have questioned the principle of the antitrust laws, particularly now that they have been on the statute books for some years. As is true of many other measures, evaluation of the antitrust laws has not proceeded from an analysis of their nature or of their necessary consequences, but from an impressionistic reaction to their announced aims.

Any form of governmental penalty on a type of market production or organization injures the efficiency of the economic system and prevents the maximum remuneration to factors, as well as maximum satisfaction to consumers. The most efficient are penalized, and, indirectly, the least efficient producers are subsidized. This tends not only to stifle market forms that are efficient in adapting the economy to changes in consumer valuations and given resources, but also to perpetuate inefficient forms.

Government unemployment benefits are an important means of subsidizing unemployment caused by unions or minimum wage laws. When restrictive wage rates lead to unemployment, the government steps in to prevent the unemployed workers from injuring union solidarity and union-enforced wage rates. By receiving unemployment benefits, the mass of potential competitors with unions are removed from the labor market, thus permitting an indefinite extension of union policies. And this removal of workers from the labor market is financed by the taxpayers—the general public.

Compulsory unemployment is achieved indirectly through minimum wage laws. On the free market, everyone’s wage tends to be set at his discounted marginal value productivity. A minimum wage law means that those whose DMVP is below the legal minimum are prevented from working. The worker was willing to take the job, and the employer to hire him. But the decree of the State prevents this hiring from taking place. Compulsory unemployment thus removes the competition of marginal workers and raises the wage rates of the other workers remaining.

It has rarely been realized that conscription is an effective means of granting a monopolistic privilege and imposing restrictionist wage rates. Conscription, like child labor laws, removes a part of the labor force from competition in the labor market—in this case, the removal of healthy, adult members. Coerced removal and compulsory labor in the armed forces at only nominal pay increases the wage rates of those remaining, especially in those fields most directly competitive with the jobs of the drafted men.

Child labor laws are a clear-cut example of restrictions placed on the employment of some labor for the benefit of restrictive wage rates for the remaining workers. In an era of much discussion about the “unemployment problem,” many of those who worry about unemployment also advocate child labor laws, which coercively prevent the employment of a whole body of workers. Child labor laws, then, amount to compulsory unemployment.

Laborers may also ask for geographical grants of oligopoly in the form of immigration restrictions. In the free market the inexorable trend is to equalize wage rates for the same value-productive work all over the earth. This trend is dependent on two modes of adjustment: businesses flocking from high-wage to low-wage areas, and workers flowing from low-wage to high-wage areas. Immigration restrictions are an attempt to gain restrictionist wage rates for the inhabitants of an area.