Open thread for night owls: 'In the land of the giants'—How Bob Bork green-lighted U.S....

Bork had won long before he became nationally known as a failed Supreme Court nominee. In a very real sense, we’re living in a world Robert Bork constructed. We’re all breathing Robert Bork’s air, suffering through Robert Bork’s wage stagnation and inequality, limping through Robert Bork’s twisted version of democracy.

Robert Bork changed U.S. policy toward concentrated corporate power without ever serving as an elected official, without altering a single line of text in any statute. His book The Antitrust Paradox simply reinterpreted the Sherman Antitrust Act as entirely concerned with consumer welfare, defined narrowly as efficiently delivering goods at low prices. He had written the concepts of democracy or economic liberty or protection of markets completely out of the story.

After a decades-long crusade, aided by a network of University of Chicago scholars, Reagan administration appointees, judges, corporate lobbyists, and executives, and even some willing Democrats, Bork got the antitrust establishment to adopt his circumscribed, dangerous vision. Federal policy on monopolies, once a subject of public interest, became a cloistered venue for economists, who build models singing the praises of the efficiencies derived from corporate combinations.