Yep. Growing up, I always defaulted to the "enlightened centrist" perspective that antitrust law and IP law and trade law were failing to help the median person simply due to the difficulty of the problem, that insofar as our regulation was inadequate it was inadequate because it had to balance multiple crossed incentives and stay ahead of world class sprinters who had a systemic resource advantage because the economy will always be larger than the regulators. But the more I learn about the history of these subjects the more I realize that the levers were understood, they did work, and that the present outcomes were entirely intentional.

Reagan and the Chicago school intentionally shifted antitrust and IP law into monopoly mode (Bork and Bowman+Posner). The Consumer Welfare Standard is an obvious fig-leaf over Robber Baron talking points as defeated earlier by Brandeis, the Nine No-Nos (lol) indicate that the failure modes of modern IP policy weren't just understood but contained, and then containment was turned off. Trade is a messier story but Triffin articulated the distributional problems in the 60s so nobody gets to claim ignorance.

The bad news is that there is more corruption that I thought, but the good news is that the problems are more solvable than I thought.