The Chicago School believed that markets operate best when they are left to organize themselves, and that state regulation only disrupts this process to...

The United States government launched the American AI Exports Program to help American firms win contracts from international customers. In a bid to enhance international competitiveness, the program risks stifling domestic competition, writes Javaid Sofi.

In new research, Nicholas Short, Sophie Hill, and Jacob Brown examine "ideological capture": regulatory capture that works not through lobbying but through experts defining what goals and values regulators may consider. Surveying the public alongside antitrust lawyers, they find the consumer welfare standard marginalizes important public concerns, like the risk of increased layoffs or more lobbying power.

Jolted by the Great Depression of the 1930s, Thurman Arnold devised an anti-monopoly industrial policy for the United States Justice Department that breathed fresh life into a then-moribund Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Arnold’s jurisprudence built on Adam Smith’s discovery that market-making could promote national security and forestall civil unrest. Smith’s insights had informed the industrial policy of Alexander Hamilton, who laid the groundwork in the 1790s for the country’s economic development. Edward H. Levi brought Arnold’s pragmatic anti-monopolism to the University of Chicago. Here, ironically, Arnoldian jurisprudence would be transmogrified into the doctrinaire company-over-country market fundamentalism of the Chicago School of Economics. Today, writes Richard R. John, as we envision for the 21st century a new pro-market, pro-freedom, pro-national security industrial policy, it is worth recalling how U. S. economic development took the form that it did, why the Chicago School repudiated the enduring wisdom of Adam Smith, and what this portends for the world of today.

Henry Simons, the “Crown Prince” of the Chicago School and a professor in the economics department and the law school prior to World War...

Adam Smith’s theory of political economy did not begin with the isolated individual but rather the individual who operates to earn the respect of others. Wealth and freedom grew from these relationships and engaging with others to create a free society, or what 20th century philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s would call positive freedom. In the 1970s and ‘80s, the Chicago School abandoned this aspect of freedom in preference of the isolated individual, which in turn produced a weaker concept of freedom, morality, and society that has stifled the cultivation of all three in the United States, writes Maha Rafi Atal.