out that when competition was reduced, these firms were free to charge more and make permanently higher profits,

and that without the goading of competition, it was not clear that they were as efficient or innovative as they could

be.

In many cases, these large firms were organized in the legal form of a “trust,” in which a group of formerly

independent firms were consolidated by mergers and purchases, and a group of “trustees” then ran the companies

as if they were a single firm. Thus, when the U.S. government sought to limit the power of these trusts, it passed the

Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890 - the nation's first antitrust law. In an early demonstration of the law’s power, the

U.S. Supreme Court in 1911 upheld the government’s right to break up Standard Oil, which had controlled about

90% of the country’s oil refining, into 34 independent firms, including Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and Chevron. In 1914,
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