薛兆丰，经济学者，美国西北大学法学院（Northwestern University School of Law）博士后研究员，北京大学“法律经济学研究中心”研究员，美国乔治·梅森大学（George Mason University）经济学博士。曾在梅森大学讲授“法与经济学”课程，并在国内发表过数百篇经济评论和文章，持续影响了读者对市场经济的认识。 2002 年出版《经济学的争议》，2006 年被《南方人物周刊》评为中国十大青年领袖。
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* 注：亨利·曼尼（Henry G. Manne）是美国“法与经济学”领域的创始人之一。他在1965年提出的“公司控制权市场理论（the theory of a market of corporate control）”开创了公司法的经济学研究，在1966年出版的《内部交易与股票市场（Insider Trading and the Stock Market）》至今仍是美国证券交易业内的讨论热点。曼尼于1952年在芝加哥大学取得法学博士（J.D.）学位。他创建的首个“法与经济学中心”（现位于乔治·梅森大学校内）曾经向大量法学教授和联邦法官提供过经济学分析的训练。曼尼现在是梅森大学法学院的荣休院长。
Foreword by Henry G. Manne
Dr. Zhaofeng Xue has written a book of enormous value to the Chinese economy. It is, in a word, a guidebook to the many traps and fallacies of American-style (and, even more, European-style) antitrust law that is being adopted willy-nilly in many countries. One cannot read or peruse this monograph without becoming completely puzzled about how such a plethora of errors could exist in this era of scientific economics and startled by the attractiveness of this muddle for other countries.
Dr. Xue’s first task then is to demonstrate why such phenomena as large-scale firms, resale price maintenance, vertical integration, below-cost pricing, price discrimination and many kinds of mergers are pro-competitive, economically beneficial practices. The strong economic logic which now explains these benefits was not, however, always understood. American antitrust laws date from 1890, while many of the convincing explanations Dr. Xue offers were not developed in the economics literature until the second-half of the 20th Century. And while American courts have for some years now reshaped antitrust law to reflect this newer understanding, other nations’ courts and regulators seem to want to stop the intellectual clock at about 1950, the highpoint of fallacious antitrust reasoning.
So even though the idea of competitive markets as maximizing social welfare has made significant inroads on political and economic thinking everywhere in recent decades, anachronistic antitrust thinking prevails in the very countries that allegedly want to adopt the best of market economics. Dr. Xue’s explanation of this phenomenon is reflective of the best in interdisciplinary thinking about economic problems.
The first and often oversimplified part of this explanation has to do with economic literacy. The policy makers (and their audiences) simply do not really understand what they are doing, since, if they did, they would be more enamored of post-1950 American antitrust jurisprudence than they are with pre-1950 ideas. To elaborate the significance of the newer learning, Dr. Xue details the development of the field known in American law schools as “Law and Economics,” an intellectual advancement of major significance. This area of study has not only influenced law professors and economists, it has had a profound influence on the judges in America’s federal courts, the locus of most antitrust jurisprudence. The importance of active educational programs for policy makers cannot be overemphasized, for without this understanding, there can be no profound improvement in the antitrust picture.
But the argument from ignorance has a major flaw; it cannot explain why this particular form of economic foolishness was selected over all the others that are available to politicians and regulators. And so Dr. Xue makes an incursion into an area rarely discussed in antitrust circles but absolutely crucial to an understanding of what is going on in many parts of the antitrust world, the field of public choice theory. This subject, the “economics analysis of political behavior,” is, in its more formalized and integrated form, also of recent vintage. Now, using the kinds of tools of economic analysis that fathered the modern antitrust understanding in America, we can begin to understand how the interests of politicians and regulators may logically (but not socially desirably) tend them in the direction of old-style antitrust.
This book will lift a veil off the readers’ eyes, as it becomes perfectly understandable how mistakes were originally made and why they persist in some parts of the world today. No one can come through this exercise without expressing strong doubts about whether antitrust is socially desirable. But if, for reasons of their own, policy makers persist in this nonsense, at least we know what to do to ameliorate the worst effects of their decisions.
Henry G. Manne
Dean Emeritus
George Mason University School of Law