An arts section piece on Columbia University's new business school buildings includes this sentence: "Glenn Hubbard, the former business school dean who brought the project to fruition, saw the need to break free from fealty to the unregulated free market economy that over decades has led to extraordinary wealth concentration."
I found the sentence puzzling. What "unregulated" economy existed over the decades to cause the wealth concentration? We have a lot of regulations here in America. So many that a full set of the Code of Federal Regulations is "approximately 200 volumes." So many that, sometimes, the wealthy capture the regulators and then use the regulation to prevent new entrants from competing, which also contributes to wealth concentration. A lot of the wealth happens, also, not because of lack of regulation but because someone works hard and creates something useful that people are willing to voluntarily pay for. I recalled from my (positive) review of Hubbard's 2013 book Balance that reducing regulation of occupational licensing was one of his ideas for increasing economic growth.
I emailed Hubbard and he kindly and quickly wrote back, in part, "I don't recall using the word 'unregulated' in my conversation with the reporter. What we discussed was the need for guardrails to advance opportunity and the ability to compete, as well as more contemporary social insurance to help people and places struggling in the overall beneficial dynamism of the economy. I talked with him about teaching Political Economy and bringing classical liberal ideas to students as well as neoliberal ones (the subject of my most recent book, The Wall and the Bridge)."