"Business damage" and "business sabotage" are competitive tactics deliberately employed by "businessmen" to eliminate rivals thereby establishing one of several conditions that constitute exclusive market power within an industry.
That is true, but that does not imply that business damage and business sabotage are only employed to eliminate rivals. And of course broader institutional constraints are an important element in that.
As you know, one crucial test of Westworld antitrust prosecution are stationarity and more generally a pattern of predatory pricing (beggaring the question of prospective dominance and "pecuniary gain")
This is an institutional constraint, which was not entrenched at the time that Veblen was writing. Yes, of course the legal tests that are used to apply anti-trust legislation are then part of the landscape which helps determine where the strategy opportunities for business damage and business sabotage lie, and is indeed one of the reasons that business damage and sabotage tended to involve more industrial collaboration in the US following World War II.
Then you quote a long block which seems to be quite valid for the time to which Veblen is referring. You seem to object to:
It is notorious, beyond the need of specific citation [BWAH!], that the great business coalitions and industrial combinations which have characterized the situation of the last few years have commonly been the outcome of a long-drawn struggle, in which the industrial ends, as contrasted with business ends, have not been seriously considered, and in which great shrewdness and tenacity have commonly been shown in the staving off of a settlement for years in the hope of more advantageous terms.
Is the complaint that the argument is not based in a neoclassical or quantitative Marxian fashion on quantities that are indeterminate until the type of strategic decisions being discussed have been made? That would seem to be a point in favor of the argument rather than a point against it, that it does not rely on fictions like the neoclassical "natural level of output" or a notion of an intrinsic level of surplus value. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
but that does not imply that business damage and business sabotage are only employed to eliminate rivals.
Veblen sez otherwise. Refer to text, exerpted above or other, if you would to illustrate how "businessmen" or trade unions damage or sabotage their own going concerns.
This is an institutional constraint [sic], which was not entrenched at the time that Veblen was writing.
"Institutional constraint" is another euphemism for statute(s), prohibitive or affirmative state sanction of business conduct. Veblen's text would seem to contradict a retrospective claim, such as yours, that neither prohibitive nor affirmative antitrust statutes were "entrenched" [read: enforced?] as of 1904. Or that he was unaware of prohibitive or affirmative antitrust enforcement up to and including 1904.
The landmark Sherman Act of course established federal standards to test anti-competitive business conduct in 1890 (you may want to review Veblen notes to the text). Prior to that act, one, sufficient schooled in Anglo or Black's jurisprudence, may argue that private actions ("litigation") among firms enforced "institutional constraints" on conduct alledged to restrain trade at least in the US from the 1850s.
English courts generally let restrictive contracts stand because they did not consider themselves suited to judging adequacy or fairness. Over time, courts looked more closely into both the purpose and the effect of any restraint of trade. The turning point came in 1711 with the establishment of the basic standard for judging close cases, "the rule of reason." Courts asked whether the goal of a contract was a general restraint of competition (naked restraint) or particularly limited in time and geography (ancillary restraint). Naked restraints were unreasonable, but ancillary restraints were often acceptable. Exceptions to the rule grew as the economic philosophy of laissez-faire (meaning "let the people do what they please") spread its doctrine of noninterference in business. As rival businesses formed cartels to fix prices and control output, the late-eighteenth-century English courts often nodded in approval.
May I remind you that I am quoting Veblen, and anyone may take a turn to excerpt the text that illustrates his or her intepretation(s) of his keen, novel analytical insight on scale efficiences of "business" motives, accounting, and credit strategies.
Incessantly questioning or ascribing value judgements to my motives is beside the issue. Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
book review, polemic Kuznets invented national income statistics, et seq intellectual history of national income accounting, e.g. 1, 2 axiology Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.
