Daily Inspiration Quote by Harold H. Greene

“Competition is good and has served us well” lands like a judicial shrug dressed up as civic wisdom: calm, clipped, and quietly ideological. Coming from Harold H. Greene, a judge best known for steering the breakup of AT&T in the 1980s, the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like a legal thesis statement. It’s the kind of sentence that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in a worldview: markets, like courts, supposedly discipline bad actors and reward merit.

The intent is to legitimize disruption. In antitrust contexts, “competition” isn’t just rivalry; it’s a policy tool, a way to justify forcing open monopolies and accepting the turbulence that follows. Greene’s phrasing does two things at once. “Is good” frames competition as a moral category, not merely an economic condition. “Has served us well” invokes a retrospective national narrative: innovation, lower prices, consumer choice, American dynamism. It’s argument by shared memory, not by data.

The subtext is a rebuke to concentrated power that has become too comfortable to defend itself. If competition has “served” the public, then the state’s job is not to manage outcomes but to keep the field open - even if incumbents claim stability, efficiency, or “one system” as a public good. It’s also a gentle warning: the court may be about to do something painful, but it’s for your own benefit.

Context matters because the late-20th-century U.S. treated competition like a civic virtue, and antitrust law became a stage where judges could translate that virtue into structural change. Greene’s line is spare enough to sound inevitable - and that’s exactly how power likes to talk when it’s rearranging other power.