ABSTRACT
For a century the antitrust laws have been the United States’ one coherent and continuing policy designed to upgrade the performance of industry— only industrial policy. The corporate organizational sector, for all its weaknesses and failures—and it has many—is nevertheless the strong heart of the modern industrial economy. The equivocal character and potential dangers in the spontaneous formation of arrangements internal to the corporate organizational entity, especially with respect to its locus of power and its exercise of choice, are exemplified by the conglomeration of US enterprise after World War II. John Kenneth Galbraith, coined the phrase, “Administered prices are the easiest to administer,” confessing that public controls operate far more easily in the regions controlled through the power of corporate management. Faced with a precipitous decline in its technological preeminence, with even basic industries in seeming danger of collapse the United States needs a policy and the capacity to upgrade its industrial performance.
