The federal antitrust laws seek to provide balance in the relationship between consumers and corporate purveyors of goods and services. Their purpose is to foster competition so as to maintain a fair price for goods and services. If there’s only one bakery in town, the price for baked goods will likely exceed what would otherwise be a fair market value, arrived at in another town where there are several bakeries, each competing for their share of the market. The concepts are simple, but their application can boggle the mind, especially when the corporation in question is as big, as dominant, and as all pervasive as the Standard Oil Company. In 1900 Ida Tarbell, one of the first “muckraking” investigative began to exhaustive research on the Standard Oil Corporation, which resulted in a 19-part series in McClure’s magazine and was published in 1904 as The History of the Standard Oil Company. The book confronts the irony inherent in corporate success: Can corporate dominance ultimately harm the consumer since dominance extends to the unfettered setting of prices and the overwhelming of the presence and growth of potential competitors. This is the story of John D. Rockefeller, a preternaturally gifted manager and financier who used anti-competitive tactics to create the most successful company of its time and become the wealthiest of all Americans in his time. The book continues to be relevant in our new gilded age, and NYU lists it as number 5 on its list of the top 100 non-fiction works of all time. Like many works of non-fiction, it’s too good to be true – but it is. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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