Administrative Law: The Bubble-Gum Trust

A monopoly is a monopoly to the Federal Trade Commission, be it in oil, steel—or bubble gum. So in 1959 the FTC began unwrapping the sticky case of Brooklyn's Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., tycoon of the baseball trading cards that now sag the pockets of every acquisitive American boy (and tomboy) between the ages of five and 15. Last week FTC Examiner Herman Tocker capped 4,000 pages of testimony with a 113-page opinion finding Topps so tops that its competitors are overcome with "a sense of futility."

Tocker says that "the world's largest manufacturer...

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