As I have argued, conservative free enterprisers depicted the state and the trade union as the only forces constraining freedom. They underemphasized corporate power or denied it altogether by imagining even large business firms as agglomerations of individuals. /1

This worldview, in which their were only individuals acting in a free market and states limiting their freedom, has left them ill-prepared to mount a serious critique of corporate power and makes their current freakout seem hypocritical./2

Here’s an example from my book (p. 187) of free enterprisers describing the economy “as consisting of individuals only...whose ability to proper faced only one menace: the ever-present threat of ‘government strangulation’”/3

They effaced the corporation (and the state) in favor of an understanding of the economy as powered by “the creative, risk-taking, profit-seeking, competitive individual,” as Fortune noted in Dec 1942, when government's centrality to the wartime economy was undeniable./4