The last job I had during law school was at a firm that defended big corporations in antitrust suits brought by the Department of Justice. I left just as Ronald Reagan was ending the era of anti-trust enforcement that stretched back to another Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt. It’s now forgotten but TR was a “progressive” politician. He was a trust buster. His grand old party has changed into the opposite of what it was in his time.

One of the ironies of our politics is that business interests present their arguments using the rhetoric of free markets in which real competition makes life better for everyone. The reality, though, is that monopoly is more profitable and the top players in every industry strive to eliminate competition by merging with or acquiring their competition. Antitrust laws once were used to at least slow that process. Today they are museum pieces resting idly on the shelves of our law libraries.

The period since 1980 has seen a relentless dismantling of virtually every policy adopted in the depression era. The elimination of those policies has eliminated the benefits we got from them. Dressed in the sheep’s clothing of free market rhetoric, the wolf of corporate self-interest has devoured the prosperity of the post-war era and replaced it with what we have today.

This piece in the NY Review of Books is short summary of this reality.