This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

When businesses suddenly raise prices, is it gouging?

But when they charge too little are they really predatory in their pricing?

And when Rockefeller's new book, The Antitrust Religion, says many of the terms thrown around

in Antitrust Law have very little meaning.

The book is published by the Cato Institute.

Terms get thrown around in antitrust law including predatory pricing and predatory bidding.

Now for free marketeers, these terms are code for vigorous competition for services and goods and

customers. How do these ideas maintain currency in the practice of

antitrust law? Well the term these terms

with with the word predatory in them have an emotional appeal to people who feel that they are being preyed upon, that they are

somehow being forced to take loans which are too generous or forced to buy things which are too cheap

or forced to buy things which are too expensive.

So the terms live on, even though there's no real way to define them.

The notion is throughout the antitrust world survives that it's somehow possible for some greedy business unit

to sell things so cheaply for a while

that all its competitors will be run out of business

and then it will be able to raise the price as high as it wants and get all that money back.

If you think about it, it seems to me it's a preposterous notion anyway but there you have it. There is a modern parallel

that you draw price gouging which is a case where instead of having products

priced too low for their purchase, the products are priced

too high and that there is a conspiracy there as well.

...