Sublime

Stigler’s mark in economics centered on the economic competency—or rather incompetency—of state power. Once man’s behavior was reduced to utility-maximizing self-interest, economists were able to tear down the edifices of government intervention in the economy; they sought “a large role for explicit or implicit prices in the solution of many social

The antimonopoly fervency in America traces back to Andrew Jackson and earlier. Hofstadter locates it in a culture of “farmers and small-town entrepreneurs—ambitious, mobile, speculative, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, and competitive.”