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as the public get-together for this specific purposeand have therefore made collusion more expensive. More important, they have reaffirmed common law doctrine that combinations in restraint of trade are unenforceable in the courts. In various European countries, the courts will enforce an agreement entered into by a group of enterprises to sell only through a joint selling agency, committing the enterprises to pay specified penalties if they violate the agreement. In the United States, such an agreement would not be enforceable in the courts. This difference is one of the major reasons why cartels have been more stable and widespread in European countries than in the United States.
Appropriate Government Policy
The first and most urgent necessity in the area of government policy is the elimination of those measures which directly support monopoly, whether enterprise monopoly or labor monopoly, and an even-handed enforcement of the laws on enterprises and labor unions alike. Both should be subjected to the anti-trust laws; both should be treated alike with respect to laws about the destruction of property and about interference with private activities.
Beyond this, the most important and effective step toward the reduction of monopoly power would be an extensive reform of the tax laws. The corporate tax should be abolished. Whether this is done or not, corporations should be required to attribute to individual stockholders earnings which are not paid out as dividends. That is, when the corporation sends out a dividend check, it should also send a statement saying, "In addition to this dividend ofcents per share, your corporation also earnedcents per share which was reinvested." The individual stockholder should then be required to report the attributed but undistributed earnings on his tax return as well as the dividend. Corporations would still be free to plough back as much as they wish, but they would have no incentive to do so except the proper incentive that they could earn more internally than the stockholder could earn externally. Few measures would do more to invigorate capital markets, to stimulate enterprise, and to promote effective competition.

 
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