Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 109.jpg

Rh Of course, the Knoxville Water Company case involved an enterprise necessarily non-competitive and monopolistic by nature,—a class of cases both limited and, from their very character, requiring State control; but it has now been demonstrated by actual results that even in this simple and limited class of cases, there could not be a solution without the aid of everybody, and that aid, having failed the Court, the disaster predicted by it has now to be faced. Taxation to make up the consequent deficits must run into large sums of money; the dislocation of business from inadequate transportation facilities to even greater sum; and the final results of checked enterprise and impaired development must inevitably follow. One almost wonders whether even in the necessary monopolies, it would not have been better to have left them to that free competition through which Liberty works to best results. But can any one reasonably conclude that even economically it is well or even possible, in relation to commodities where a still more flexible adjustment is imperative, to throw the ultimate determination of the millions of daily transactions upon the Supreme Court of the United States? Apart from the fact that no Court, even of supermen, could ever transact all the business of the United States, it is equally clear that that business could not be carried on if, with the hourly fluctuations that must take place in the value of commodities, every dealer in them must wait for the time necessary to ascertain whether he was legitimately engaging in business or had committed criminal offenses beyond number.

Professor Laughlin upon this subject calls attention to one of the peculiar results of rate fixing in relation to monopolies, saying: "It is a strange