Paper and Sci-Hub:
I think it's important to note that just because there was a private interest for passing the bill, that doesn't mean there wasn't public interest as well. Public interest and private interest are not mutually exclusive, and we often have more than one reason for doing things.
I think it's also important to point out that while Mr. John Sherman may have introduced the bill out of purely private interest, it takes more than one person to make a bill become law. Consider: Sherman introduces the bill for reasons of revenge, and then it passes through the house and senate because of public interest.
The paper is useful for it's many citations into other research on the matter.
This paper argues that Senator John Sherman of Ohio was motivated to introduce an antitrust bill in late 1889 partly as a way of enacting revenge on his political rival, General and former Governor Russell Alger of Michigan, because Sherman believed that Alger personally had cost him the presidential nomination at the 1888 Republican national convention. When discussing his bill on the Senate floor and elsewhere, Sherman repeatedly brought up Alger’s relationship, which in reality was rather tenuous, with the well-known Diamond Match Company. The point of mentioning Alger was to hurt Alger’s future political career and his presidential aspirations in 1892. Sherman was able to pursue his revenge motive by combining it with the broader Republican goals of preserving high tariffs and attacking the trusts. As a result, this paper reinforces previous public choice literature arguing that the 1890 Sherman Act was not passed in the public interest, but instead advanced private interests.I am interested in the extent to which public policies we hold dear today were passed by accident. It is suspicious if popular legislation were originally passed with drastically different rationales than we use today. It seems more likely that modern scholars rationalize in favor of their status quo or political biases than that we keep accidentally wandering into great policies.
I think it's important to note that just because there was a private interest for passing the bill, that doesn't mean there wasn't public interest as well. Public interest and private interest are not mutually exclusive, and we often have more than one reason for doing things.
I think it's also important to point out that while Mr. John Sherman may have introduced the bill out of purely private interest, it takes more than one person to make a bill become law. Consider: Sherman introduces the bill for reasons of revenge, and then it passes through the house and senate because of public interest.
The paper is useful for it's many citations into other research on the matter.
