Coercive Monopoly - Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Lysander Spooner started the commercially successful American Letter Mail Company in order to compete with the United States Post Office by providing lower rates. He was successfully challenged by the U.S. government and exhausted his resources trying to defend what he believed to be his right to compete.

2. For about six months, Thomas Gibbons and Cornelius Vanderbilt operated a steamboat with lower fares in defiance of the law. Gibbons successfully took his case to the United States Supreme Court. The Court ruled in Gibbons v. Ogden that the state-government-granted monopoly, which conducted some service between New York and New Jersey, was an unconstitutional violation of interstate commerce. Fares immediately dropped from $7 to $3.