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for introducing the controls that are necessary to avoid the evils of laissez faire.

The evils to be avoided were abundantly demonstrated during the dark days of the late twenties and early thirties.

Economists of a generation or so ago had assured us of the divinity of laissez faire by almost mathematical demonstrations that among free competitors the sub-marginal enterprise was unsound and would be eliminated in a natural and inevitable competitive purge. The competitive purge, we are told, would keep our system always in approximate balance and all would be well if only we kept our eyes tightly shut and permitted absolutely free competition to operate our economy.

Despite these assurances, we found to our sorrow that absolutely free competition can too often be a means of swift economic suicide. The relatively strong competitor, when the business curve falls, can cut prices and wages and resort to other means of battle, whereas the relatively weak enterprise may find itself deep in the sub-marginal class, which means extinction. The logic of the matter is either that the strong will ultimately approach monopoly, or that we will endure colossal waste through the repeated births and deaths of the weaker enterprises. Those forced out of business by inability to survive the onslaughts of more fortunate competitors in depressed times are not necessarily un-economic enterprises. They are in fact often needed. And the strong competitor will either reach out and occupy their place -- which means monopoly -- or new interests will enter the field, finally to struggle and die, as did their predecessors, in a vicious cycle of waste that does incalculable harm.

Conscious of the danger in this process of free competition, leaders in industry and government have for some years seen that there must be means for providing controls and curbs which will make the competitive process work in a more orderly manner. As the President recently said, "Competition, of course, like all other good things, can be carried to excess."2

The ancient prohibitions of the common law against deceptive and dishonest methods of competition are usually not enough to introduce the needed sound order. Nor has it suffered merely to supplement the common law with certain additional statutory prohibitions. The problems of modern industry are too varied and complex to be dealt with by a general code of morals. Each business has its peculiar problems, changing from day to day, and the requisite controls and curbs must be as varied and as changeable as the problems which make them necessary.

2Senate Doc. No. 173, 75th Cong., 3d Sess., p. 5.