Experience - later buttressed by research - helped to establish the following four principles: 1. There should be no barriers to the entry of new market players (barring criminal and moral barriers to certain types of activities and to certain goods and services offered). 2. A larger scale of operation does introduce economies of scale (and thus lowers prices). This, however, is not infinitely true. There is a Minimum Efficient Scale - MES - beyond which prices will begin to rise due to monopolization of the markets. This MES was empirically fixed at 10% of the market in any one good or service. In other words: companies should be encouraged to capture up to 10% of their market (=to lower prices) and discouraged to cross this barrier, lest prices tend to rise again. 3. Efficient competition does not exist when a market is controlled by less than 10 firms with big size differences. An oligopoly should be declared whenever 4 firms control more than 40% of the market and the biggest of them controls more than 12% of it. 4. A competitive price will be comprised of a minimal cost plus an equilibrium profit which does not encourage either an exit of firms (because it is too low), nor their entry (because it is too high). Left to their own devices, firms tend to liquidate competitors (predation), buy them out or collude with them to raise prices. The 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act in the USA forbade the latter (section 1) and prohibited monopolization or dumping as a method to eliminate competitors. Later acts (Clayton, 1914 and the Federal Trade Commission Act of the same year) added forbidden activities: tying arrangements, boycotts, territorial divisions, non-competitive mergers, price discrimination, exclusive dealing, unfair acts, practices and methods. Both consumers and producers who felt offended were given access to the Justice Department and to the FTC or the right to sue in a federal court and be eligible to receive treble damages. It is only fair to mention the "intellectual competition", which opposes the above premises. Many important economists thought (and still do) that competition laws represent an unwarranted and harmful intervention of the State in the markets. Some believed that the State should own important industries (J.K. Galbraith), others - that industries should be encouraged to grow because only size guarantees survival, lower prices and innovation (Ellis Hawley). Yet others supported the cause of laissez faire (Marc Eisner). These three antithetical approaches are, by no means, new. One led to socialism and communism, the other to corporatism and monopolies and the third to jungle- ization of the market (what the Europeans derisively call: the Anglo-Saxon model). B. HISTORICAL AND LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS Why does the State involve itself in the machinations of the free market? Because often markets fail or are unable or unwilling to provide goods, services, or competition.