Ten Thousand Commandments, by Harold Fleming, 1951
A fascinating and still important book about government relations with business, focusing on the history of anti-trust legislation, administrative, and judicial practices. If we seek to build a world fit for explorers we must understand the path that has led us astray.
In Chapter 2, "Everybody out of step but government lawyers," Fleming writes:
It is hard to believe that all this industrial power, available both for peace and for war, has been built on error and by criminals. When a young man shows great power in athletics or an old man holds together toward the century mark, people think there must have been something good in the makings of such a man. Not so, however, with American industry in the eyes of the federal courts and the government lawyers. It is full of original sin and needs to be taken apart and put together properly.
...
The trouble isn't simply that almost every businessman in the United States could now, by the new rules, be haled into court by government officials and be fined, branded a criminal for the most commonplace and accepted practices, and subjected to treble-damage suits by competitors and customers. It is that the policies and practices by which American business has grown so phenomenally productive have one and all in recent years been damned, discouraged, and suppressed.
The book is available online, without charge, at http://mises.org/books/fleming.pdf