Daily Inspiration Quote by John Bates Clark

Clark is doing something quietly radical here: lowering the bar on purpose. He concedes that real-world markets are messy, imperfect, and nowhere near the textbook ideal of frictionless competition. That admission is not intellectual humility so much as a strategic move. By refusing to demand “an ideal degree of efficiency,” he makes room for a weaker, more politically usable claim: even imperfect competition can discipline power.

The key phrase is “seeming monopolies.” Clark is writing in an era when “trusts” and industrial giants looked like permanent fixtures of American life. His subtext: monopoly is often a snapshot, not a destiny. The “type of competition” he points to is less the crowded marketplace of Econ 101 and more a dynamic threat - entry, substitution, technological change, rival business models - that can destabilize dominance without needing the state to micromanage outcomes.

He’s also quietly redefining what matters. Efficiency becomes secondary; the primary virtue of competition is constitutional: it “holds...in check.” That’s an argument aimed as much at lawmakers and the public as at fellow economists. It says: don’t judge markets solely by whether they hit an ideal; judge them by whether they prevent private concentrations of power from becoming sovereign.

Read this way, the quote is an early blueprint for a persistent American impulse: skepticism of monopoly paired with faith that competitive pressure, even when diluted, can be a self-correcting restraint - a claim that would later shape both antitrust debates and their deregulatory counterarguments.