Content area
Full text
Journal of Business Ethics (2008) 83:759771 Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s10551-008-9663-x
Ethical Aspects of Using Government to Subvert Competition: Antidumping Laws as a Case Study of Rent Seeking Activity Robert W. McGee
ABSTRACT. This article examines the question of whether it is ethical for company officials to use the force of government to reduce or eliminate foreign competition, using the antidumping laws as a case study. This article begins with a brief examination of the U.S. anti-dumping laws and then examines several ethical questions related to the antidumping laws. The main question to be addressed is whether, and under what circumstances, it is ethical for domestic producers to ask government to launch an antidumping investigation against a foreign competitor. Related questions to be examined include (1) Whether it is ethical to ask the government to launch an antidumping investigation even when the domestic company making the request knows that dumping has not occurred; (2) Whether it is ethical to ask for an anti-dumping investigation in cases where dumping (according to the definition of dumping) has occurred, where the effect is to help domestic producers at the expense of the general public. This article examines these questions by applying both utilitarian and non-utilitarian approaches.
KEY WORDS: rent seeking, antidumping, utilitarian ethics, rights theory, special interest
An overview of antidumping laws
Antidumping laws have been in existence at least since World War I, if not before. An argument could be made that the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and Section 73 of the Wilson Tariff Act of 1894 could have been used to punish foreign producers for dumping their products on the U.S. market (Dale, 1980, p. 12), which takes us back more than a century. However, domestic producers have been complaining about dumping for even longer. Frederic Bastiat, the
nineteenth century French economist, wrote his brilliant rebuttal to those who complain about dumping in the 1840s (Bastiat, 1964a, b).
Although antidumping laws have been around for a long time, it was not until the 1970s that they began to be used with any frequency. Until recently, it was mostly the U.S. and a few other developed countries that used the antidumping laws as a matter of regular trade policy. However, since the creation of the World Trade...