http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/12/business/as-americans-take-up-populism-the-supreme-court-embraces-business.html
[snip] Most important, however, may be a broad pro-business consensus within the upper ranks of the legal profession, one that has been more than two generations in the making. Paradoxically, the evolution may have its roots in the Democratic Party. The early 20th-century approach closely associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis saw big business as a political problem, not just an economic one. Big business, the thinking went, was incompatible with democracy both because of its ability to influence public officials and because of the power that big business had over the lives of ordinary citizens. By the 1970s, however, leading Democratic intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith were arguing that a frontal attack on big business was passé and that the government’s focus should be maximizing economic growth instead. These intellectuals proposed that liberals should make their peace with large corporations and simply oversee them as if they were giant utility companies. In his 1973 book “Economics and the Public Purpose,” Mr. Galbraith argues “that antitrust is largely irrational,” said Barry C. Lynn, who runs the Open Markets program at New America. “That we need to concentrate things, put experts in control of them.” The movement essentially stripped considerations of political power from regulation of corporations, and made it more of a technocratic exercise. This set the stage for a second critical development: the conservative assault on regulation, most famously from the law and economics movement associated with the University of Chicago. That group of scholars and lawyers argued, with empirical precision, that antitrust enforcement, as well as a variety of safety and environmental regulations, often did more harm than good, and that free markets were better at promoting growth. “That’s the one-two punch,” said K. Sabeel Rahman, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who studies the intersection of economic regulations and politics. “You move to a technocratic view, then ‘law and economics’ uses those technocratic arguments against you.” [snip] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
