Cartels : challenge to a free world by Wendell Berge

Cartels by Wendell Berge is a nonfiction treatise written in the mid-20th century. It argues that international cartels operate as private governments that suppress competition, retard technological progress, distort prices and output, and even endanger democratic institutions, and it calls for vigorous antitrust enforcement and broader public access to technology to protect a free economy. The opening of the book sets out a postwar challenge: unprecedented opportunities in science and industry will be squandered unless cartel power is curbed. The author traces the shift from domestic trusts to international cartels, linking cartelization to totalitarian control and showing how secret industrial “treaties” can undermine public foreign policy, citing the Dusseldorf understanding as emblematic. He then details how monopolies and patent cartels throttle technology and markets, illustrating with cases involving synthetic rubber, 100‑octane fuels, optical instruments, plastics, tungsten carbide tooling, glass containers, and fluorescent lighting, while highlighting how expensive patent litigation crushes smaller rivals. Turning to health, he describes insulin price-fixing and export carve‑ups that shut Americans out of Latin American drug markets, and then opens a case study of a synthetic‑hormone cartel (Schering, Ciba, Organon, Boehringer, Chimio), noting U.S. prosecutions and wartime evasion tactics, before outlining how a U.S. affiliate became a hub for maintaining blocked German trade. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

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About this eBook

Author Berge, Wendell, 1903-1955
Title Cartels : challenge to a free world
Original Publication Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1946.
Credits Tim Lindell, Daniel Lowe, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
Language English
LoC Class HD: Social sciences: Economic history and conditions, Production
Subject Trusts, Industrial
Subject Monopolies
Subject Restraint of trade
Category Text
EBook-No. 78077
Release Date
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
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