Then the Chicago School pulled off a brilliant coup. They promoted an antitrust theory that dispensed with the idea of citizenship altogether; instead, they insisted anti-monopoly regulators should limit themselves to thinking about “consumer welfare,” forgetting all that high-minded stuff about “democracy” and “citizenship.” Bork’s version of antitrust concerned itself primarily with maximizing short-term consumer welfare—mostly in the form of lower prices—rather than promoting competition as an end in and of itself. (We emphasize “short-term” because it turns out that once fields are cleared of competitors, consumer benefits like lower prices evaporate fast.)

Putting the focus on consumer welfare changed the calculus completely. So long as prices went down (or at least, didn’t go up), companies more or less stopped having to worry about antitrust enforcers showing up with subpoenas. That meant they could use predatory pricing to squeeze smaller rivals out of markets. It also meant they could dangle the promise of new efficiencies and lower prices to persuade regulators to let them buy up competitors that were previously out of bounds.