1. This story by @daiwaka reveals George Mason takes money from big business, which has openly been their model since the 1970s. I don't understand why we need studies in the 2010s showing corruption works when Manne was bragging about it in the 1970s. nytimes.com/2020/07/24/tec…
2. The history of our world was very much shaped by Henry Manne's organizing of judicial seminars and law school corruption in the 1970s and 1980s to reshape the law for big business. This is known. We've known it for decades. Alliance for Justice wrote a book about it in 1993.
3. @ddayen constantly points it out. So do academics inside who know it's happening. What I don't understand is why the pervasive corruption within academia of economists isn't taken for granted at this point. prospect.org/power/big-tech…
4. Why would we trust anyone in the antitrust insider world as having credibility? Take this article from, once again, @ddayen, which will probably be re-reported in a few months by a fancy outlet. prospect.org/power/big-tech…
5. "Legal representatives for three of the four (big tech) companies previously served in the Obama admin, including Lanny Breuer, former head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, now repping Amazon as part of Covington & Burling’s legal team."
6. Or this story. seattletimes.com/business/antit…
7. The modern center-left founders of the "Harvard School," Don Turner and Phil Areeda, rejected predatory pricing doctrine in the late 1970s while on the payroll of IBM, which was facing a predatory pricing suit. Their protege Herb Hovenkamp dominates antitrust discourse.
8. So while I appreciate the flurry of stories showing big money flowing into shaping antitrust law, I think we haven't fundamentally come to grips with the ideological problem, which is the reliance on narrow highly technical experts to shape the law itself.
9. In other words, the alternative to @ProfWrightGMU and George Mason isn't pure as the driven snow lefty economists, it's removing economics from antitrust and turning the law into a simpler and more basic doctrine that helps small business and anyone with common sense can use.
10. Antitrust laws were never written with econometric nonsense in mind, but to protect small business, or as one Supreme Court Justice put it in 1897, "small dealers and worthy men." They were re-written four times, 1890, 1913, 1936, 1950, to get rid of elitist barnacles.
11. And to be clear, we absolutely do need stories from reporters like @daiwaka showing big money shaping antitrust law, because experts are considered scholars instead of lobbyists. I just don't understand why such a dynamic is not broadly understood.
12. In 2018, I noted that many economics experts testifying before the FTC on its year-long set of hearings on big tech and antitrust self-evaluation was on the payroll of big tech, without disclosure. They all posed as academics. fastcompany.com/90253465/shoul…
