The U.S. Experiment with Fair Trade Laws

Download or read book The U.S. Experiment with Fair Trade Laws written by Laura Phillips Sawyer and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prior to the Great Depression and President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from trade associations of independent proprietors. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as "fair trade." Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis, and institutional economist E.R.A. Seligman supported RPM as a legitimate tactic to protect small businesspeople and enhance non-price competition. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted "unfair competition" allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.