Appelbaum, The Economists' Hour

Nader [in 65] argued accident victims were hurt not by the initial crash but by the “second collision” with the interiors of their own vehicles. Accidents were inevitable, but injuries could be prevented — and car companies were hardly trying...

Nader’s attack on the car companies was an attack on the primacy of markets. He was rejecting the idea that unhappy consumers should simply buy other products. In the idealized world of economic models, consumer choice was a sufficient mechanism to force improvements in the safety of automobiles. In a nation with three big automakers, where driving had long passed from luxury to necessity for most people, Nader recognized the need to find another way of forcing companies to make safer products. He recognized the need for regulation ...

In 1960, the top four firms had brewed 27 percent of the beer; by 1980, the top four firms brewed 67 percent. And economists pointed out the price of beer had steadily declined.

Consumer advocates like Ralph Nader increasingly took the existence of large corporations for granted; rather than trying to break companies apart, they sought to strengthen federal regulation.

The rise of the Japanese economy also began to shift public debate. Japan treated industrial conglomerates as a source of strength, not a threat to society and the state. American corporations argued consolidation was necessary to compete, and some politicians began to sound sympathetic notes ...

In April 1952, dozens of engineers from some of the world’s largest companies .. boarded buses in New York City and headed [to AT&T]. They were guests of AT&T, which had patented a new electronic device called a transistor just a few months earlier, and had invited its potential rivals to spend nine days learning exactly how they could make transistors, too. ...

There was a simple explanation for AT&T’s generosity: the federal government forced the company to share its inventions as part of an aggressive, carefully considered, and wide-ranging campaign to prevent large and powerful companies from hoarding innovations...

The mythology of the computer revolution, of libertarians developing ideas in Silicon Valley garages, is usually narrated without any mention of the role played by government. It was antitrust regulation that opened the market and allowed those ideas to bloom.

Limiting the market power of large corporations was a distinctly American tradition ...

It was the Kennedy admin who started dismantling progressive taxation, Carter started dismantling econ regulation, Clintons went even further ...

Proponents of faith in markets also developed a close relationship with the corporate elite, which was not as inevitable as it may seem in retrospect. Conservative economists like [Milton] Friedman and his close friend George Stigler initially expressed fear of corporate power and argued that restraining corporate concentration was one of the few legitimate functions of government. Some conservative economists still do. But many decided to make common cause with corporations against government power. ...

Friedman [an economic conservative], and other leading economists, also expressed views that pained social conservatives, including support for immigration, the legalization of drugs, and gay rights. Many social conservatives had hesitations about the 1964 presidential campaign of the libertarian Barry Goldwater; many economic conservatives were pained by the racist agenda of George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign. Yet by the 1970s the two camps had found a sufficient patch of common ground: social conservatives who feared for their moral values and economic conservatives who feared for their property values both felt profoundly threatened by the expansion of government. Religious leaders including Robert Schuller, pastor of the Garden Grove Community Church in Orange County, synthesized the two strains of conservatism by characterizing the pursuit of wealth as a moral enterprise. Schuller called his church a “shopping center for God” and told his congregants, “You have a God-ordained right to be wealthy