Joseph Stromberg's The Political Economy of Liberal Corporatism is a wonderful little tract that explores monopoly, early progressivism, and imperialism from an Austrian perspective.
What Gabriel Kolko shows in The Triumph of Conservatism and Railroads and Regulation is that, contrary to popular belief, most of the Progressive legislation regulating business activity was promoted by Big Businessmen themselves in order: (1) to avoid local, populistic regulation; and, (2) to "rationalize" (i.e., cartellize) the economy at the expense of smaller competitors and the consumers.
Kolko points out that "(o)nly if we mechanistically assume that government intervention in the economy, and a departure from orthodox laissez-faire, automatically benefits the general welfare can we say that government economic regulation by its very nature is also progressive in the common meaning of that term.'' Only by investigating the intent and consequences of regulatory laws can the historian assess the inner nature of Progressivism and modern Liberalism. In these two respects, Kolko writes that "the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated" and that the regulatory commissions and bureaus were controlled by "leaders of the regulated industries.'
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Why such regulation is, nonetheless, so widespread and popular is perhaps explained by some remarks of Jane Jacobs. In The Economy of Cities she writes:
“The primary economic conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.... In this conflict, other things being equal, the well-established activities and those whose interests are attached to them, must win. They are, by definition, the stronger.”
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