Robert Bork is the architect of the inequality crisis

If you know the name Robert Bork, it's probably in the context of his failure to secure Senate confirmation when Ronald Regan put him up for the Supreme Court (his sins from his days in the Nixon administration caught up to him).

But Robert Bork's failure to attain a Supreme Court seat did nothing to erode his influence: indeed, Bork's work, more than anyone else's, is responsible for the new Gilded Age, with its inequality crisis, political instability, and looming environmental disaster. If the human race ends up extinct in a generation or two, Robert Bork will be high up in the list of people to blame for it.

Bork was a liar, who invented a fictional history of US anti-monopoly law in which the lawmakers who authored, debated and passed those laws didn't actually mind monopolies at all -- all they cared about was "consumer harm" (that is, the prices paid by the public rising in the short term after a company or handful of companies cornered their markets); and "collusion" (especially trade unions, consumer groups, and other checks on corporate power).

Bork's ideas were radioactively implausible, but they did have an important advantage in the "marketplace of ideas": they stood to make the richest people in America much, much richer, and so Bork found no shortage of corporate backers who helped him create a network of judicial "education" programs, political campaigns, think tankies, and intellectually dishonest academics who would line up behind his idea. Every president since Reagan has expanded Bork's doctrine, allowing for even more aggressive market concentration, producing a country (and a world) where a handful of firms dominate virtually every industry, from telcoms to talent agencies, wrestling to eyewear, to Big Tech. Read the rest