Politics & Power Quote by Harold H. Greene

Faith in markets can sound like common sense until you notice who is doing the believing. Harold H. Greene, a federal judge best known for steering the AT&T breakup, is talking like an industrial strategist: competition as a civic technology that doesn’t just lower prices but manufactures the future. The clunky phrasing ("in information ahead") is revealing. This isn’t a polished slogan; it’s a jurist’s working premise, said in the idiom of policy rather than poetry. He’s defending an architecture of incentives.

The specific intent is to justify antitrust-style intervention not as punishment but as propulsion. Greene’s courtroom power was structural: he could redraw the communications landscape by deciding what kinds of monopoly behavior were tolerable. By framing competition as the engine of "greater innovation", he offers a moral alibi for disruption. Breaking up concentrated power becomes synonymous with protecting American dynamism.

The subtext is nationalist and futurist. He isn’t cheering rivalry for its own sake; he’s linking it to American supremacy in the emerging "information" economy. That word choice places the quote in a late-20th-century shift: industrial strength is being redefined as network capacity, computing, telecom, and the control of data flows. Competition is cast as geopolitical insurance.

Context matters because a judge touting markets is also signaling limits: courts can create the conditions for competition, but they can’t invent the next technology. Greene’s line works because it fuses legal restraint with economic ambition, translating a sweeping industrial bet into a seemingly neutral principle: let companies fight, and the country wins.