EARLY AMERICAN PRICE-FIXING LEGISLATION

Authors

Arthur S. Aiton, University of Michigan

Abstract

One of the most pernicious delusions of legislators is the persistent notion that the enactment of a law is the panacea for any human ill from short sheets in hotels to the immodesty of certain styles of female apparel. The history of law-making is strewn with the wreckage of freak legislation of this character but the law-mills, heedless of the past, continue to spew forth new monstrosities and to revive old failures. That the human family cannot be legislated into a set mold of behavior and that the economic laws which underlie trade and intercourse cannot be enacted out of existence would seem to be self-evident. Yet, in the face of this, laws impossible of enforcement, seeking to realize some group's idea of the millennium by a process of legal bludgeoning, or to create an economic condition by fiat, continue to find their way into the statute books. These illegitimate laws create confusion and their failure brings an undeserved loss of repute to the great body of good law and to the entire machinery of enforcement. Sporadic attempts to fix price levels in certain commodities and well-intentioned efforts to tinker with prices and profits in modern times evidence a dangerous tendency toward the revival of the old fallacy of price-fixing by law. Numerous examples of experiment and failure in this type of legislation in the past might be cited, but the writer prefers to illustrate the futility of these endeavors by the hitherto unutilized story of the first great American trial of price-fixing legislation.

Recommended Citation

Arthur S. Aiton, EARLY AMERICAN PRICE-FIXING LEGISLATION, 25 Mich. L. Rev. 15 (1926).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol25/iss1/3