In 1947, Machlup and Watts’s nascent position reflected the first halting steps of a neoliberal literature on unions toward the position that analyzed them in terms of monopoly power and delegitimated this labor monopoly power because it was established by legalized coercion. This important literature emerged in the 1950s, almost all of which was connected with the MPS or its Volker-funded affiliate, the FEE. This literature appeared as the counterpart in economics of the concurrent political assault on American unions and those in business or in government that supported them. For example, these works promoted an extremely critical stance on the national wage-bargaining process, arguing that this machinery was just an attempt from unions combined with compromised employers to manipulate prices to the detriment of consumer sovereignty.

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 971