Daily Inspiration Quote by Isabel Paterson

Calling antitrust a "freak" is a deliberately impolite move: Paterson wants the reader to feel, not just understand, that something has gone structurally wrong. "Freak legislation" isn’t merely eccentric; it’s an indictment of lawmaking that has wandered from principle into anomaly, a creature that exists but doesn’t cohere. The line’s power is in its compression. Antitrust, a system meant to police market power, is framed as uniquely unclassifiable: it "stand[s] alone", outside the normal categories of criminal and civil law where prohibitions are legible and predictable.

Then comes the knife: "Nobody knows what it is they forbid". Paterson isn’t claiming regulators are dumb; she’s claiming the law is engineered for interpretive elasticity. The subtext is about power. A vague statute doesn’t just punish bad conduct; it gives enforcers discretion to decide, after the fact, which behavior counts as illegal. That turns business planning into superstition and compliance into guessing the mood of the state. It also flatters politicians and prosecutors: if the rule is unclear, the referee becomes the game.

Context matters. Paterson wrote in a mid-century America where antitrust was both muscular and inconsistent, swinging between trust-busting moral crusade and technocratic case-by-case balancing. From her libertarian-leaning vantage, that inconsistency isn’t an accident but a feature of a regulatory regime that can always find a villain: big when it’s big, coordinated when it’s coordinated, efficient when it’s too efficient. The wit is acid, but the aim is serious: a warning that ambiguity in economic law is a backdoor to arbitrary governance.