Across political eras, corporations have been recast as either predatory villains or tools of the state—distorting their proper role in a free economy.

It seems everyone hates corporations these days, but that is nothing new. For more than a century, Americans have swung between denouncing large firms as predatory Leviathans and attempting to conscript them for nonbusiness ends. That process may now be entering a new phase—one with broader implications for whether America remains a free country.

In the Progressive Era, corporations were portrayed as extractive engines of class power, tolerated only if constrained by supposedly impartial regulators and administrative oversight. Since the New Deal, many of those same critics shifted ground, arguing that corporations could be harnessed to advance environmental goals, collect taxes, deliver health insurance, impose maximum working hours, and pursue public priorities that legislatures had avoided, delayed, or even rejected.

Now the New Right has mounted its own indictment, charging corporate America with “woke” cultural coercion, economic disloyalty, and an unhealthy intimacy with left-wing regulators and the administrative state. The result is a curious consensus of hostility, in which corporations are cast either as tyrants or as sycophants, rather than as what they are in a free society: organizations that coordinate capital and labor to produce goods, services, and prosperity within the rule of law.

The Progressive Era attacks on corporations grew out of the massive expansion in economic activity following the Industrial Revolution. Local markets merged into a national economy, and firms scaled up in response. The federal government began regulating at the national level under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, with measures like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Antitrust Act asserting authority over what was seen as harmful corporate conduct.

...read more at thedailyeconomy.org