The Luckiest Guy in the World by Robert Abrams

Author:Robert Abrams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510759039
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2021-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

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The Reagan administration claimed the reason they weren’t enforcing antitrust laws was that they wanted to return power to the states. We knew of course that wasn’t the real reason. Malcolm Baldridge, the secretary of commerce at the time, made it perfectly clear that the administration’s hostility toward antitrust came down to one factor: they perceived it as being bad for business.

Toward the end of the Reagan years, I had a revealing conversation at a meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in the Del Coronado Hotel near San Diego, California. President Reagan’s attorney general Ed Meese was there.

“Bob,” he said to me, “all that stuff about returning power to the states, that wasn’t really what we wanted. We had a laissez-faire plan of non-enforcement. You guys outfoxed us. We won the battle but we lost the war! We never thought the states would have the competence to do this. We never imagined that you would be able to work together.”

This view—that the states would not be able to cooperate with one another—harkened back to the early days of our nation’s history when the colonies were governed by the Articles of Confederation, which failed because of rivalries. My colleagues and I discovered, however, that not only were we able to share information and cooperate with one another, but we were even willing to share resources. It was truly a historic accomplishment.

The Reagan administration had stopped enforcing antitrust laws against anticompetitive mergers. The attorneys general were united in wanting to enforce these laws, but the legal basis of our arguments varied according to the laws of each individual state. Many of the states had strong statutes, such as the Donnelly Act in New York, the Cartwright Act in California, and the Valentine Act in Ohio. But we couldn’t go to court speaking fifty different dialects. We had to establish a common vocabulary and nomenclature, so we adopted a set of merger guidelines.

And in a similar way, to protect consumer interest with respect to vertical restraints, such as resale price maintenance and vertical mergers, forty-eight out of the fifty states agreed to enact Vertical Restraint Guidelines. The adoption of these guidelines was a huge triumph. Such action and the attention it garnered created a momentum by the attorneys general and people were realizing that the states were a force to be reckoned with.

My office tackled many more antitrust cases over the years, including one on behalf of American Express, which was facing a bank boycott issued by Visa and Mastercard. To the outside world, it seemed as if there was robust competition between credit card companies, but we soon found out that they were raising and fixing prices, standardizing procedures, and blocking competitors. We started to take a closer look.

There was a statute that said that under certain conditions—and we knew that in this particular case we met those conditions—a state could get the investigative files of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We demanded the files of the Justice Department.

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