Recently I posted a critique of Matt Stoller’s nasty attack on the late Aaron Director. Stoller didn’t just challenge Director’s views; he suggested not too subtly that Director changed his views because he was paid to do so.
I found that highly implausible and because of that charge and the whole tone of Stoller’s post, I called his article a hatchet job.
Stefano Feltri of the site where Stoller’s article was published asked permission to rerun my post. I agreed and he did so, along with an answer by Stoller.
My post and Stoller’s answer are here. I’ll let you judge the quality of Stoller’s response.
READER COMMENTS
Matthias Goergens
Oct 3 2019 at 9:31am
Well, it would have been useful to list which tenets they were allegedly fighting about.
David Henderson
Oct 3 2019 at 10:04am
My guess is that one of them was antitrust. Simons was quote in favor of breaking up large firms.
Mark Brady
Oct 6 2019 at 2:37am
Matt Stoller quotes Rob Van Horn. Here is a more complete transcription with the footnotes.
“As the FMS wound down, in 1951, Jacob Viner—a classical liberal and renowned economist who left Chicago for Princeton in 1946—recollected his experience at a Volker-funded conference headed by Director and Levi at the Chicago Law School:13 “[Everything] about the conference except the unscheduled statements and protests from individual participants were so patently rigidly structured, so loaded, that I got more amusement from the conference than from any other I ever attended . . . even the source of the financing of the Conference, as I found out later, was ideologically loaded.”14”
“13. Viner demonstrated his classical liberal credentials on issues concerning monopoly in a 1959 address on the intellectual history of laissez-faire at the University of Chicago Law School. There he admonished, “In any case, monopoly is so prevalent in the markets of the western world today that discussion of the merits of the free competitive market as if that were what we were living with or were at all likely to have the good fortune to live with in the future seem to me academic in the only pejorative sense of that adjective” (1960, 66). Invoking Henry Simons, Viner called for a challenge to monopoly practices: “given the prevalence or danger of substantial intrusion of monopoly into the market, the logic of the laissez faire defense of the market against state-intervention collapses and there is called for instead, by its very logic, state-suppression or state-regulation of monopoly practices, which one may wish to call, as Henry Simons called it, an instance of ‘positive laissez faire’” (p. 67).
“14. See VPML, November 24, 1969, Viner to Don Patinkin, box 53, folder:
Patinkin, Don).”
The above is taken from Rob Van Horn’s “Reinventing Monopoly and the Role of Corporations: The Roots of Chicago Law and Economics” in The Road from Mont Pèlerin (2009).
So does the renowned economist Jacob Viner provide support for Matt Stoller?
David Henderson
Oct 6 2019 at 5:43pm
Thanks for the quote, Mark.
To answer your question, no; it doesn’t provide support for Matt Stoller’s point. If Stoller had simply argued that Director disagreed with Viner, then it would have provided support. But Stoller did a really nasty ad hominem on Director and this quote provides no support for the claim that Director gave up his own views because he was paid to do so.
By the way, even I though I admire Viner, my take on him is that he would sometimes get on his high horse. So his reaction doesn’t surprise me. If I recall correctly, Friedman had a story about Viner refusing to admit a point Friedman had made, and then, after the class or session ended, saying one on one to Friedman that he, Viner, had erred.
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