“The Real Corruption Is the Ownership of Congress by the Rich” Richard Posner
Posted on March 28, 2017 by Asher Schechter
In a keynote interview during the Stigler Center’s conference on concentration in America, Judge Posner said: “You are not going to have people competing with the Koch brothers.” On antitrust, Posner said: “Antitrust is dead, isn’t it?”
“The real corruption is the ownership of Congress by the rich,” said Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, one of the most prominent legal scholars of the last five decades, during a keynote interview today at the Stigler Center’s conference on concentration in America.
Posner is one of the most influential antitrust scholars of the last 50 years, and one of America’s most prominent legal minds. During a conversation with University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Luigi Zingales [one of the editors of this blog], Posner harshly criticized the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, declared antitrust “dead,” and described the American judicial system as “very crappy” and “not well-designed to get good people.”
On the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, Posner said: “If you become a member of Congress, you’ll get a card from the head of your party that you will spend five hours [each] afternoon talking to donors. That’s not the only time you spend with donors—they’ll take you to dinner, cocktails—but these five hours are important. The message is clear: You are a slave to the donors. They own you. That’s [the] real corruption, the ownership of Congress by the rich.”
Later, remarking on the logic behind Citizens United, Posner said: “The Supreme Court says there’s no such thing as spending too much money to support a political candidate, because your money is actually speech—that’s all nonsense.”
The interview began with a review of Posner’s vast experience in government and antitrust, since he started clerking for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan in 1962. Posner elaborated on the changes antitrust in the U.S. has gone through in the past three decades: “When I became a judge in 1981, I thought I had a lot of interesting antitrust cases, and I did—for about three years. And then they started to dry up. By the 2000s, there were virtually no antitrust cases left.”
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