eart of the notion was the judgment
that general uniform prices fixed in the open market are the proper
norms for prices when one of the traders is caught at an exceptional
disadvantage. The modern world has been compelled to reexamine the
conception of the just price.

Sec. 3. #Evil economic effects of monopolistic price.# Theoretical
analysis confirms this view. Any exercise of monopolistic power over
price keeps some, the weaker bidders, from getting any of the desired
goods, or limits them to their most urgently desired units. What
may be called "the theoretically correct price"[3] with two-sided
competition is the one that permits the maximum number of trades
with a margin of gain to each trader. In narrowing the possibility of
substitution of goods by trade, the sum of values of goods for most
men is diminished. All citizens thus that are the victims of an
artificially created scarcity look upon monopoly as "bad," just
as they do upon the evils of nature--drought, locusts, fires, and
pestilence. A monopoly has an indirect and more distant effect upon
the spirit of all those trading with it. If they are producers selling
at prices depressed by monopoly, their money incomes are reduced; if
they are consumers buying at monopoly prices, their real-incomes are
reduced; in either case their psychic incomes, the motives of all
industry, are diminished, and their industrial energies are relaxed.

Sec. 4. #Common law on restraint of trade.# The first recorded case in
English law, wherein the courts sought to prevent the limiting of
competition by agreement, runs back to the year 1415, in the reign
of Henry V. This was a very simple case of a contract in restraint of
trade, whereby a dyer agreed not to practise his craft within the town
for half a year. The court declared the contract illegal (and hence
unenforceable in a court) and administered a severe reproof to the
craftsman who made it. Thus was set forth the doctrine of the moral
and legal obligation of each economic agent to compete fully, freely,
and without restraint upon his action, even restraint imposed upon
himself by a contract voluntarily entered into for his own advantage.

Not until the eighteenth century was this rigid doctrine somewhat
relaxed so as to permit the sale of the "good will" of a business
under limited conditions, and some "reasonable" contracts in restraint
of trade. Later the emphasis was somewhat further shifted, by judicial
interpretati