There’s a good (long form) article in the Washington monthly by Brian Feldman that talks about the decades-long decline of St. Louis and how much of it can be attributed to the fact that our political system has turned its back on the kind of anti-trust law that I was taught in junior high when I learned of the break up of ITT. The article is full of concrete examples of law after law that were relegated to dusty shelves as Democrats and Republicans alike let loose the furies of mergers and acquisitions that exploded in the 1980s and continue to this day. (Can you say, “Too big to fail”?)
I have a thought about this. Two thoughts, actually.
Thought number 1: Look ma! I read a long-form article. Me, Mr Short-Attention-Span.
Thought number 2: Robert Bork.
I am not a student of this, but I remember hearing a few years ago about how over his career, Bork embarked on (among other things, I assume) a project to rewrite the law surrounding anti-trust. As I recall it, he kept at it year after year, slowly crafting a new legal framework, slowly building an edifice that rejected the kinds of protections they taught in my 7th grade class. I half-expected to see mention of Bork’s role in the St. Louis decline in Feldman’s article.
I probably have some/many of the details wrong, but you don’t have to search far to find pieces of that story. For example, here on Wikipedia, where his book, The Antitrust Paradox, is discussed. Or read this Washington Post article which discusses Bork’s anti-trust legacy.
So my second thought is this: The essence of his framework was to elevate consumer welfare above all else. That anything goes as long as a bag of chips is cheap. Nothing is of value other than the prices paid by consumers. (Maybe I have it wrong. But that’s my grok-age of his framework.) And so, that brings us back to St. Louis: how does the steady and significant decline of a city measure in Bork’s economic calculus? Is that not a cost worthy of consideration?
Oh. And I have a corollary thought about Bork. It’s not a new one: … OMG, did we dodge a bullet.