The U.S. Forgot What Antitrust Is For

During the summer of 1968, the African American citizens of Claiborne County, Mississippi, had finally had enough. Fed up with the endless indignities of Jim Crow, they banded together to boycott local white-owned merchants. The merchants chose an unusual response: They filed an antitrust lawsuit that accused more than 100 individuals, as well as the NAACP, of trying to quash competition between black and white businesses. In essence, the boycotted merchants were depicting collective political action as a garden-variety price-fixing cartel.

Although the merchants won in a lower court, the U.S. their claims—and for good reason. Antitrust laws were meant to target corporate power and greed. If you squint hard enough, a political boycott may look a bit like a cartel. But antitrust has always made room for altruistic behavior. Antitrust law has even allowed self-interested agreements among companies in the same industry, if their intent was to help the overall market function better.