2 History and Structure of US Consumer Protection 2 History and Structure of US Consumer Protection
2.1. Douglas Kysar, The Expectations of Consumers
Read 1707-1715
2.2. Amy Kapczynski, The Lochnerized First Amendment and the FDA
Read Section 1 (on the history of the FDA)
2.3 Luke Herrine, The Folklore of Unfairness 2.3 Luke Herrine, The Folklore of Unfairness
The Federal Trade Commission Act should be understood as part of a decades-long struggle to develop institutional infrastructure at the national level to yoke the increasingly nationwide social provisioning process to collectively arrived at priorities: the “public interest”.[1] The evolving set of political coalitions that waged this struggle—first Populist then Progressive—did so in part by borrowing legal standards (“restraint of trade”, “non-discrimination”, “common carrier”, “just and reasonable prices”, et al.) that common law courts had used to regulate markets at the local level before the disruptions of the Second Industrial Revolution. “Unfair competition” was among these standards.
In their original context, these standards were embedded within a “moral economy”, a common sense shared among jurists and civilians alike that “the economy [w]as inseparable from the basic institutions and public concerns of their daily lives. As such, it was [and ought to be] held to the same rigorous controls and legal standards that governed all aspects of life” in a “well-regulated society.”[2] The Populist and Progressive coalitions that borrowed them sought to construct an updated moral economy—this time enforced at the national level. They were repudiating the ideology of laissez faire and of self-correcting markets: instead insisting that markets were constructed to serve collective interests and should be held accountable through political and legal institutions. But they were not attempting to simply turn back the clock. They repurposed common law concepts for a new context as part of an ongoing set of experiments in reimagining what a more democratic[3] social provisioning process could look like.
“Moral economy” is a term that English historian E.P. Thompson introduced to refer to the relatively “consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations [pertaining to economic life], of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community.”[4] As William Novak has pointed out, until well into the nineteenth century than “the word ‘economy’ meant something different” it does to us today.[5] Oikos is Greek for “household” and nomos for “rule” or “law”: oiko-nomia (oeconomia in Latin) referred to household management.[6] “By the eighteenth century…the word was broadened to include any society ordered after the manner of a family or, similarly, the general administration of the concerns of a community with a view to orderly conduct and productiveness.”[7] And the purpose of economy—political economy, public economy, moral economy—was securing the “common wealth” and ensuring that it was produced and distributed in accordance with public morals, as interpreted by those in power.
One crucial part of moral economy was forcing as many transactions as possible to take place within public markets and to impose detailed regulations on those markets in an attempt to standardize those transactions.[8] “In the context of technologies of the time, characterized by the absence of standardization, by very little information and very ineffective methods of control, bargaining fitted into a system that aimed to contain it within the strictest of limits.”[9] Walton Hamilton notes that one can trace the public morality of “an open market, a fair price, an honest measure, and a quality good after the fashion of the day” back to English “folkways,” which eventually became the foundation of the common law as it formed out of the rules established at frankpledges and fairs, among guilds and in the town ordinances they wrote.[10] These customs were carried over to the colonies, and (as Novak illustrates) “[n]early all state legislatures in the early nineteenth century passed laws directing ‘trades to be conducted, and wares and goods to be fabricated, and put up for market in a certain manner’” as well as laws prohibiting nearly every business from being conducted without a license, and laws requiring trade to be conducted only in public markets subject to rules for labeling, inspection, and fair dealing.[11]
The Populist coalition that created the first round of antitrust laws had been raised to understand commerce in such terms, and they borrowed those terms to impose some moral order on the brave new world they were confronting. Sanjukta Paul has shown that the drafters of the Sherman Act appropriated the concept of restraint of trade from the common law in large part to enact moral economy norms that allowed coordination among small producers (and workers) so long as it did not prevent others from practicing their trade or undermine the public regulation of trade.[12] William Boyd has shown that rate regulation has roots in that centerpiece of moral economy: the ancient doctrine of just price or “fair price” (justum pretium).[13]
Boyd’s analysis of the history of fair price can help to understand the logic of fairness that undergirded moral economy and guided early antitrust thinking. The central concern of fair price jurisprudence has been, since the time of Aristotle, ensuring that prices reflect the “common estimation of the community” and/or some reference to the “real” value of the item (in terms of relative scarcity, of social importance, and other factors) rather than the ability of a given seller (or buyer) to exploit a bargaining partner.[14] In other words, and in congruence with republican political values, prices should reflect the public process of valuation—the needs of a community relative to its available resources—rather than the ability of a private will to extract from the commonwealth.[15] Fair price doctrine has been especially concerned with sales of necessities (especially grain), of goods with thin markets, and of goods and services between parties with highly unequal bargaining power—in contrast to sales on “normal” markets—because such sales make exploitation more likely.[16] The details of the doctrine, however, have “varied over time and space, representing a pragmatic response to the demands of social order and stability.”[17]
Fair price has long existed alongside notions of fair dealing in moral economy schemes.[18] As with fair price, norms of fair dealing have been oriented towards preventing businesses from taking advantage of their social position—with ensuring that the process of competition is controlled by the public rather than any private will.[19] Just as fair price can be understood in terms of ensuring that pairwise transactions reflect the common valuation of the community in which the transaction is embedded, fair dealing can be understood in terms of creating standards of conduct that ensure a businesses only make money by serving the public interest. Some norms of fair dealing have been focused on the assurance of the quality and safety of products while others have been focused on ensuring that business is conducted honestly—that exchanges reflect the will of both parties rather than the ability of one party to get one over on the other.[20] The so-called “ancient maxim of caveat emptor” (which leaves all buyers to their own devices rather than enforcing norms of fairness) is, as Walton Hamilton once painstakingly demonstrated, an invention of the latter half of the nineteenth century.[21] The Latin expression is not to be found in the work of any “Roman author whose works survive” nor does it take on its modern meaning in the common law until the broad acceptance of laissez faire among elites after the Civil War.[22]
Standards of fair dealing, long elaborated in detailed ordinances and guild rules, became unsettled as guilds broke apart, regulations of public markets began to fade, and especially as trusts broke free of the state- and local-level regulatory schemes that would have once bound them.[23] Some standards of fair dealing became standards of “unfair competition” when competition was no longer regulated by guilds but by courts.[24]
The final version of the FTC Act represented a mixed vision. As Laura Phillips Sawyer puts it, “Republican progressives [hewing more towards Roosevelt’s vision] won a regulatory agency empowered to determine the limits of ‘unfair competition’ while Democratic populists [more of the Brandeisian school] weakened the agency’s broad powers and ensured that it would act as an information-sharing body.”[1] Its ambit was restricted to issuing cease and desist orders, which it then had to go to a court to enforce—thus requiring court review of all of its determinations. As such, the FTC stood in an ambiguous place somewhere between imposing its interpretation of the meaning of “unfairness” on businesses and facilitating and supervising the process of businesses working out mutually acceptable rules for fair dealing.[2]
Yet the result was not entirely ambiguous. A common concern among those who voted for the FTC Act was the need for an independent governmental agency that could collect information on how different industries worked, facilitate debate (in the agency and at Congress) over appropriate business conduct, and enforce the resulting standards. The agency, like the ICC, would be “independent” in the technical sense that it would be headed by a bipartisan commission, with commissioners removable only for cause and serving a term of years.[3] In part this independence reflected a valuation of expertise, but perhaps more importantly it reflected the felt need to create a space of deliberation relatively insulated from short-term politics and especially from the ability of big business to hijack and/or capture processes meant to rein in their power.[4] It was also broadly agreed that efficient production and distribution were beneficial, but that they could not be the sole orientation of political economy.[5] Collective priorities had to be set through a deliberative process that involved some combination of experts and the non-expert public, and in any case not left to the whims of the owners of capital. The social provisioning process could not be understood entirely in terms of what it produced and to whom the products were distributed. At least as relevant were the ways in which the social provisioning process ordered social relationships (between owner and worker, producer and jobber/wholesaler, retailer and consumer), and the knock-on effects of that ordering on the way people were able to live their lives and participate in political processes. In other words, the shared vision was of an independent agency that would deliberate over the interests relevant to various areas of commerce (including but not limited to input-output efficiency) and to elaborate and enforce standards of conduct that best balanced those interests.
The FTC had been created by a coalition that understood themselves in terms of their role in the production process. Consumer identity was in its infancy—what we would now think of as consumer movements had not yet achieved national political influence.[1] Although unfair behavior towards consumers was certainly considered, the new agency was designed primarily to do justice as between participants in the process of production and distribution.[2] Consumers would benefit indirectly to the extent that competition was kept honest—to the extent consumers’ goodwill was earned—but their interests were not centered in the substance or the procedures of the FTC.
And yet the great majority of the FTC’s early enforcement actions targeted consumer fraud. Five of the first ten FTC cases involved consumer misrepresentations, justified on the theory that manipulating consumer demand unfairly takes business away from competitors.[3] Myron Watkins found that ninety-one percent of the FTC’s orders in 1931 focused on deception.[4] Thomas Blaisdell found that, as of 1928, 427 of 846 total cease and desist orders (i.e. 51%) were related to misrepresentation.[5] Likely this focus was due to the fact that consumer fraud actions were relatively uncontroversial (one did not have to take a side on competing views about antitrust), relatively easy to prove, and something business’s had a strong incentive to report about their competitors.[6] Many of these actions involved relatively trivial labeling misrepresentations (about, e.g., the exact chemical composition of a good) of the sort that competitors care a lot about even when consumers might not.
In any case, the Supreme Court quickly approved of including consumer fraud in the FTC’s ambit in FTC v. Gratz, noting that practices were unfair if, among other things, they were “opposed to good morals because characterized by deception, bad faith, fraud, or oppression.”[7] The Court initially tended to restrict the FTC’s authority to practices that had been found “unfair competition” at common law, but in Winsted Hosiery it went further and agreed with the FTC that “misbranded goods [that, e.g., advertise themselves as ‘Merino wool’ when only containing ten percent wool] attract customers by means of the fraud which they perpetrate, [and] trade is diverted from the producer of truthfully marked goods.”[8] In fact, the Supreme Court—with Brandeis himself writing—went even further, finding the FTC could take action against misbranding even if all competitors within an industry engaged in it, because doing so would ensure that honest businesses would not have to engage in misbranding just to stay competitive.[9] The clear implication was that the FTC was not bound by the proprietary reasoning [at common law]: harm to consumers mattered even if a competing firm could not claim a property right in those consumers’ goodwill.
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In the Progressive Era, the main focus of what we would now call “consumer protection” at the federal level[1] was on health and safety risks that increasingly consolidated and profit-focused companies (removed from local networks of trust) were willing and able to offload onto a public (with a decreasing ability to determine the quality of goods sold). Muckraking journalism created public outcries that movement leaders channeled into legal reform. Most notably, the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 produced such a torrent of outrage that Congress created the Food and Drug Administration only two years later.[2] Though there was an emerging consensus that cutting costs on health and safety measures was not an acceptable form of increasing productive efficiency and that government had a role to play in preventing firms from competing on that margin, these early efforts stalled out as the Progressive movement dissolved in the acid of World War I and the public’s turn to the pro-big-business politics of postwar “normalcy.”[3] Just one bellwether: when the FTC released a scathing and detailed report on the meatpacking industry’s profiteering during the war, the New York Times accused it of anti-American subversion and Congress stripped its jurisdiction over meatpackers.[4]
Over this same period of time, advertising practices became much more widespread and sophisticated. Fresh off of the wartime project of developing the first modern state propaganda machine to gin up support for America’s entry into the Great War, ad men took the lessons learned to develop the modern practices of business propaganda.[5]
A growing chorus of social researchers argued that businesses were taking advantage of consumers’ vulnerabilities.[6] These concerns were often paired with worries about the tension between widespread business propaganda and the nurturing of critical thinking necessary for a free and democratic society. Even outside of Progressive circles—even, indeed, in the University of Chicago economics department—many agreed that consumers largely could not protect themselves against the overwhelming new powers of massive enterprises.
Many of these concerns were expressed by newly organized consumers themselves. Over the 1920s, various strains of Progressive and socialist organizing began to focus on consumer interests as part of broader campaigns for increasing the power of the working and middle classes and, for some, to end racist practices.[1] The growing appetite for a consumer movement was evidenced by the increasing number of bestsellers [LH1] that focused on how big business undermined consumers’ interests. The Tragedy of Waste, published in 1925, and Chase and Frederick Schlink’s Your Money’s Worth, published in 1927, flew off the shelves. They were followed by Schlink and Albert Kallet’s 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs in 1933, and by M.C. Phillips’s Skin Deep and James Rorty’s Our Master’s Voice: Advertising in 1934.[2][LH2] The scandalized began to join consumer organizations, including Schlink and Chase’s own Consumer Research, which quickly grew from an informal newsletter to the first product testing and consumer advocacy organization with nationwide scope.[3]
Both elite and grassroots worries about advantage-taking in mass society can be seen as updates to traditional moral economy concern that exchanges reflect the public process of valuation rather than the manipulations of the powerful. If advertising was being used to manipulate desires and bamboozle the public, purchasing choices were more properly seen as reflecting the private interests of the propagandizing businesses rather than the free choices of well-informed individuals. If businesses could cut costs by offloading risks onto the public without being detected, they were engaged in just the sort of unfair dealing that had been prohibited in public markets since the early days of the common law.
Consumer advocates (including Schlink, Kallet, Rorty, Caroline Ware, and Robert and Helen Lynd, among many others) had a voice in early New Deal efforts, including the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB) of the National Recovery Administration (NRA) (which, it should be noted, was focused on creating rules of “fair competition”),[4] the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), and, once World War II started, the Office of Price Administration (OPA).[5] All consumer-focused institutions in the New Deal state created publications on businesses—some of which provided detailed comparative price reports, local councils of consumers, and varying degrees of enforcement authority for consumers themselves. Jacobs points out that “[t]hese New Deal programs legitimized consumer activity and raised what Robert Lynd identifie[d] as a ‘growing consumer consciousness.’”[6]
As Meg Jacobs observes, many consumer representatives inside and outside government had become less inclined to “break up corporations” than to “organize[] consumers and a strong labor movement as necessary antidotes to corporate power.”[7] Mass society and big business had come to seem more inevitable and decentralizing ownership and control over the productive process had come to seem less desirable as the living memory of nineteenth century proprietarian republicanism faded.[8] The nature of the Progressive coalition had changed.The journey to the UDAP standard began in earnest when Milton Handler—a professor of law at Columbia and New Deal statute drafter extraordinaire—connected with Schlink and Kallet to work on efforts to incorporate regulation of advertising practices into the Food and Drug Act.[1] Handler brought Rexford Tugwell—also from Columbia—into the discussions, and the resulting “Tugwell Bill” was proposed by Senator Copeland in 1933.[2] The bill made misleading advertisements of food or drugs equivalent to misbranding, which would have enabled the FDA to remove the advertised products from the market, and included liability for the media companies that printed the ads.[3] In advocating for the bill, Tugwell made the fair competition argument that banning misleading practices would be a boost to honest advertisers.[4]
Unsurprisingly, several business lobbies pushed back hard, arguing that consumers ought to be trusted to make rational decisions, referring to consumer mobilizations as “the so-called consumer movement” as they created industry-funded “consumer organizations,” and developing self-regulatory approaches to point to the ability of the “private sector” to clean up its act.[5] But advertising regulation was not high on the Roosevelt Administration’s priority list, and the President was not interested in picking that particular fight.[6]
As debate dragged on and consumer advocates lost more and more ground, FTC Chair Ewin Davis saw an opportunity. He proposed that the relevant authority be given to the FTC, which had less enforcement power and, Davis argued, could act like more of a neutral authority.[7] Davis proved an able lobbyer, and the bill that ultimately became the Wheeler-Lea Act moved quickly through the House.[8] Consumer protection forces got an extra boost when the horrid side effects of two drugs—sulfanilamide and dinitrophenol—scandalized the country.[9]
Although there was some remaining controversy over whether the FTC should have authority over food and drug advertising, the creation of a ban on “unfair or deceptive acts and practices” was hardly even debated.
The acquisition of UDAP authority did not immediately change the FTC’s pattern of enforcement.[1] In fact, it did not change the FTC’s pattern of enforcement until the next upswell of consumer discontent twenty years later.
This wave of activism—and the evolving redefinitions of the public interest in consumer markets that went with it—slammed into the FTC with the “Nader Report” of 1969.[1] The report portrayed the prevalence of businesses taking advantage of consumers, especially poor consumers, as a “crisis”, and it portrayed the FTC as falling down on the job, both because of incompetence and because it was “engaged in active and continuing collusion with business interests—especially big-business interests.”[2] The authors of the report—recent graduates of elite law schools—were referred to as “Nader’s Raiders”. But they were not entirely outsiders: they were given inside access to the inner workings of the FTC by Elman himself.[3] They largely adopted Elman’s own elitist liberal analysis. For instance, the report singled out then-Chair Paul Rand Dixon, whom Elman hated (and who literally slammed his door in the Raiders), for his chumminess with big business, his lack of interest in setting priorities, and his “well-known prejudice against ‘Ivy League lawyers’” and in favor of “political and regional cronyism.”[4] The report also held up the (Elman-initiated) cigarette advertising regulation as “indicative of what the FTC would be capable of if properly directed and motivated” and recommended a slew of reforms oriented towards increasing the power and responsiveness of the agency in addition to giving consumers a more direct say.[5]
With the increasingly powerful third wave of the consumer movement behind it, the impact of the Nader Report was felt almost immediately. As Congress began holding hearings, President Nixon commissioned the ABA to issue its own report. Released later in 1969, the ABA report was only slightly less scathing than Nader’sBy 1977, the FTC had no fewer than seventeen consumer protection rulemakings ongoing, along with multiple other enforcement initiatives and research projects.[1] Unfairness played an increasing, though not a dominant, role, serving as the primary source of justification for the Credit Practices Rulemaking that had been initiated as a result of the extensive body of research on predatory practices in ghettos and would become the basis for much modern collection regulation.[2] Congress continued to egg the FTC on, holding hearing after hearing to ask Commissioners why they were not moving faster in passing and enforcing consumer protection regulation.[3]
The groundwork had been laid, and the continued strength of the consumer movement pushed the effort farther. When elected alongside a landslide of Democrats, Carter consulted with Nader himself to determine who to appoint to head the FTC.[4] When Pertschuk took office in 1977, it seemed to most the FTC was finally coming into its own as a robust, popular, and creative consumer protection agency.As businessmen became more politicized in the 1970s—the historian Rick Perlstein refers to them as “Boardroom Jacobins”—they began to build these institutions.[1] One of the first steps was spreading a vulgarized version of neoliberal gospel—touting the magic of “the market”—to the masses. For example, in the middle of the 1970s, the Ad Council ran a campaign touting the virtues of a “free enterprise system” across multiple media outlets and providing free booklets to schools and colleges, reaching a substantial portion of the population.[2] Much of this advertisement ran free of charge, as advertising firms convinced publications that these were “educational” materials.[3]
Meanwhile, consumer advocates found themselves on more precarious ground. The stagflationary conditions of the mid- to late-1970s—the “panic at the pump”—made the public more skeptical of institutions, more alienated, more open to arguments that emphasized individual grit over collective power.[4] Inflation made consumers more price conscious and further divided the interests of organized labor and organized consumers (at least as understood by the leaders of each).[5] The federal government’s failure to arrive at a coherent or effective approach to dealing with the simultaneous inflation and recession further delegitimized the Keynesian consensus, especially after the crises of Watergate and Vietnam.[6] Many of the “new class” who had formed the base for pro-consumer skepticism of big business entered the business world themselves, especially in the “knowledge economy”—accommodating themselves the more pro-business politics of the new “professional-managerial class”[7] Consumer advocacy organizations all found it harder to raise money and retain, let alone recruit, members, and the rapid increase in the number of these organizations had them competing for support.[8]Much of the young blood in the Democratic Party was more interested in checking the power of government than the power of business.[9] “Deregulation”—that is, reregulation in favor of capital accumulation[10]—also became part of the agenda of the emerging class of self-identified “neoliberals” (a.k.a. “New Democrats”, “Atari Democrats”) in the Democratic Party.[11]
Because consumer protection law was beginning to threaten the prerogative of capitalists in the inflationary environment of the mid-1970s and because it felt especially threatening to the small-margin businesses that provided the crucial organizing power to the new big-small business coalition, it was a target of the Boardroom Jacobins from early on.[12] One of their first victories was the defeat of a new Consumer Protection Agency, the highest priority structural reform from the third wave of consumer activism that “would have institutionalized government-funded consumer advocates as part of the regulatory process, with the power to compel companies to provide data.”[13] In political scientist Lee Drutman’s telling, “in the early 1970s, the legislation to create the agency seemed almost certain to become law, passing by wide margins in each chamber in separate Congresses, but for procedural reasons failing to pass both chambers in the same session.”[14] As the decade wore on, “business lobbyists somehow managed to hold passage of the CPA at bay through a few well-chosen congressional allies and their clever procedural tactics, buying time to turn public opinion against it through aggressive grassroots activities and issue advertising warning of a new nanny state.”[15] Although Carter was swept in along with a wave of Democrats, many of the bastions of the liberal wing did not return to Congress, and the 1978 elections saw Democrats shift further to the right.[16] By 1978, the balance of power had shifted enough that the CPA was defeated once and for all.[17] The FTC was next.Reagan’s ascension to the presidency was the result of the newly unified business lobby joining forces with a coalition of disaffected members of the white working class, socially conservative Christians, and suburbanite anti-tax revolutionaries that had been diligently cultivated since the Goldwater campaign.[1] His campaign presented “big government” as the problem. He took office with a laser focus on radically reshaping the regulatory landscape to leave business leaders free to pursue capital accumulation without social obligation. Soon the administrative state was being run by neoliberals who had cut their teeth explaining why the regulatory state needed to be dismantled.[2]
Reagan’s transition memorandum on the FTC was drafted by James Miller, a
“child of the free market movement” who was the co-director of the anti-regulatory Center for the Study of Government Regulation at the American Enterprise Institute. He would go on to lead Reagan’s deregulatory agenda.[3] The memo reinterpreted the role of the FTC in terms of “efficiency”, glossing the Progressives’ ideas entirely in terms of promoting a free market[4] It recommended “[t]erminat[ing] all cases based on ‘social theories’…The role of the Commission in the area of consumer protection should be to replicate, to the degree feasible, the workings of an efficient market place.”[5] The FTC should also adopt cost-benefit analysis, making sure to focus on the shortcomings of regulation and the benefits of the market, especially in its information-conveying capacity.[6] It should cease any skeptical or adversarial approach to business, and return to the more cooperative model of learning from experts at profit mining. Regarding unfairness specifically, “the Commission [should] define the term solely in terms of economic benefits and costs to consumers.”[7] In fact, ideally Congress should undertake the task of definition instead of letting Commissioners do it. To accomplish these goals, an ideologically friendly Chair would be needed, and more staff trained in neoclassical economics would have to be hired and become “more integrated” into the regulatory process.[8][LH1]
Miller [LH2] himself was appointed to be that Chair. Miller was the first economist to serve as a Commissioner, let alone Chair. And he was firmly of the Chicago School. Miller’s efforts were supported by Timothy Muris—the co-editor of the book of law-and-economics essays critical of the FTC and the author of the essay arguing that the FTC’s funding should be cut to the bone unless it fully institutionalized the neoliberal understanding of the role of a consumer protection agency.[9] Perhaps in recognition of that effort, Muris served as a lawyer on Reagan’s transition team alongside Miller, likely contributing drafting to its radical statement on reforms at the FTC.[10]
Like William Humphrey during the 1920s return to “normalcy”, Miller was committed to remaking the FTC to defer to big business whenever possible. In Mark Budnitz’s account, Miller “felt the Commission had spent too much of its resources adding costly regulation when it should have used cases and rules to ‘reinforce market forces.’”[11] He contrasted his own “sober calculation” of economic reasoning with the “moralistic posturing” of Pertschuk.[12] Accordingly, he was opposed to any “adversarial” approach to business leaders and adopted the view that “agency officials should be immune to the influence of interaction [except with ‘experts’ in business], and that policy can be decided solely by means of objective, neutral, data-driven analysis.
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The mildness of the reauthorization bill can be made sense of in part by positing that Congress had been assured that the FTC had, at least for the moment, internalized a more moderate version of its own power.[1] After all, neoliberalism had not only remained hegemonic, it had become bipartisan. President William Clinton had been a part of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of political entrepreneurs focused on shifting the base of the Democratic Party away from the working class and towards “knowledge workers” and the professional-managerial class.[2] While this part of the middle class had once been the core of the third-wave consumerist rebellion, they had become increasingly business-friendly, skeptical of government bureaucracy, and removed from association with the working class. They warmed to a politics that focused on growth over distribution. They found an anti-bureaucratic and pro-consumer-choice notion of freedom congenial. Neoliberal frameworks that conceptualized government bureaucrats as oppressive paternalists who could never truly understand the market and consumer choice as the highest expression of freedom fit nicely. When neoclassically trained economists took over most policy thinking for the Democratic Party, the left wing of neoliberalism took shape.