The FTC’s formal enforcement machinery could only handle around a hundred cases yearly

Evidence

The problem which Section 5 posed to the Commission was this: How could it possibly accomplish the objectives which Congress had set for it by the cumbersome procedure which Congress had provided. It must have been apparent from the beginning that the.Commission could not deal, through the full paraphernalia of formal procedure, with more

than a hundred or so violators each year. Experience, at any rate, has shown this to be true. Yet the Commission was being asked to reshape, or at least to mold, the practice of most of American business.

— Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 645

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the earlier housing-code chapters’ point that complaint-based enforcement cannot scale to systemic problems — same enforcement-capacity constraint across domains. — connects to: Congress created the FTC because the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement lacked continuity across administrations — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 627
• QUESTION: How did Congress and the FTC resolve this mismatch — through cease-and-desist settlements, trade practice rules, or something else? The chapter appears to build toward that.