I’ve noted before the “tension” between federal antitrust law (which penalizes private “monopolies”, while excusing real monopolies, i.e. those formed by state agencies and law) and patent law (in which the state grants private monopolies to some companies to allow them to avoid “unbridled” competition for 17 or so years).

As noted in my post Intellectual Property Advocates Hate Competition, IP proponents support these monopoly privileges on explicitly anticompetitive grounds. Take this explicit opening passage in an article by an ardent IP advocate, Jerome H. Reichman, a law professor at Duke:

Four months ago, Canadians emphatically renewed the ruling party’s conservative mandate, handing Stephen Harper and the Tories the country’s first majority government in over a decade. This victory was underscored by the humiliating decline of the Liberals — the country’s “natural governing party” — who were displaced by a radical fringe party in their office of Official Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons.

Neoclassical economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Joseph Stiglitz tell us that the healthcare market is imperfect (or “Pareto inefficient”), meaning that the allocation of services is not optimal from the standpoint of social welfare. They point to information asymmetry as an important cause of this imperfection: patients cannot distinguish on their own the physician from the charlatan, the surgeon from the butcher, the remedy from the snake oil, the hospital from the coop.

What should you give up in order to make your payments? Food, education, transportation, funds to live on in old age?

[A Century of War (2006]
 

It is interesting to compare Lincoln and his treachery in causing the Southern “enemy” to fire the first shot at Fort Sumter, resulting in the Civil War, with Roosevelt’s similar manipulation causing the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II.

The precapitalistic system of production was restrictive. Its historical basis was military conquest. The victorious kings had given the land to their paladins. These aristocrats were lords in the literal meaning of the word, as they did not depend on the patronage of consumers buying or abstaining from buying on a market.

One of the reasons that most economists of the 1920s did not recognize the existence of an inflationary problem was the widespread adoption of a stable price level as the goal and criterion for monetary policy. The extent to which the Federal Reserve authorities were guided by a desire to keep the price level stable has been a matter of considerable controversy. Far less controversial is the fact that more and more economists came to consider a stable price level as the major goal of monetary policy.

I say to Judge Posner, look to Hayek on the business cycle, the way you did on law and economics.