The several types of legislative restriction on freedom in pricing, including the Robinson-Patman Act, state fair trade (resale price maintenance) acts, and various laws actual and proposed to prevent selling below cost, and to restrict or prevent the use of so-called loss leaders in retail selling, all have a common social ancestry. They stem broadly from the sentiment for protecting the small merchant against his larger competitors. They belong, in other words, to the same family as the discriminatory chain store tax measures. In an era when security is the watchword, these laws represent the determined drive of certain groups of retailers and wholesalers to improve their economic position and make it secure against the stresses of competition.1 There are, of course, other strains in the ancestry of these measures, but the urge to obtain security for the little fellow is the predominant one. The average business man, unless he belongs to a group benefited by these laws, is likely to characterize all these restrictions on his pricing freedom as governmental interference and regimentation, objectionable outgrowths of the New Deal. Actually, however, these particular developments are quite alien from one aspect of the New Deal, namely, the trend towards economic planning and state socialism, as exemplified, for instance, in the Tugwellian philosophy. The thoughts of the economic planners run more in the direction of permitting the development of large businesses to the point where the state can assume control of key production and distribution industries without having to direct the destinies of hundreds of thousands of small enterprises. But the Robinson-Patman Act was not fundamentally a New Deal measure. In fact the sentiment which fathered this Act and its various blood relatives has in it more that is reminiscent of the beginnings of the Nazi movement in Germany, where the same zeal was displayed to protect the small business man