Lest we forget that deregulation was a project of the left, not just the right, here is Marxist legal historian Morton Horwitz in 1984:
Almost nothing in the antitrust debates supports what would soon become Theodore Roosevelt’s new conservative distinction between “good trusts” and “bad.” Roosevelt was operating under a newly emerging view that corporate concentration could be justified by economic efficiency-increasing returns to scale. Only corporations that achieved dominance through illicit means-financial manipulation or unfair competition-were “bad” trusts. By contrast, the old conservatives who passed the Sherman Act did not believe that the neoclassical economic law of diminishing returns had been repealed. [B]igness was per se bad. From their perspective, large-scale economic concentration was inherently illicit because, according to economic laws, there was no way corporations could legitimately achieve overwhelming economic dominance. Almost nothing in the Sherman Act debates suggests that economic concentration could be justified on efficiency grounds. That was for a later day.
. . .
The regulatory state, originally conceived as a means of checking corporate power, has gradually become discredited. In most cases deregulation now means that corporate power will simply be left unchecked. The original Progressive conception of the state as the means to our salvation must be fundamentally reconsidered. Without the sort of decentralized institutions that the old conservatives (and Progressives like Brandeis) supported, we seem destined to fluctuate between deregulation and its somewhat less overtly rapacious and more noble sounding sibling, regulation. Deregulation generally means unrestrained corporate control. Regulation frequently means more subtle, more disguised, and often more effective forms of corporate control.
Morton J. Horwitz, Progressive Legal Historiography, 63 Or. L. Rev. 679, 686 (1984).
Curiously, Horwitz’s position is today fast becoming the mainstream, bipartisan position on markets. Thus, to borrow Horwitz’s schema, we have come full circle, from the old conservative vision of antitrust-defended, laissez-faire markets of atomized sellers, to the new conservative/Progressive consensus on the importance of size, to the triumph of the Progressive accommodation with size in the form of New Deal rate regulation, to the triumph of the new conservative accommodation with size in the form of deregulation and Chicago School antitrust, to today’s gathering return to the old conservative rejection of size and embrace of an antitrust-defended atomized laissez faire. Ah me.