Early Chicago neoliberals disagreed over whether to abolish or capture regulators

Evidence

By the 1970s, Milton Friedman was surely the most famous US exponent of neoliberalism. He popularized Chicago neoliberal analysis, though sometimes crudely and ineffectively, as when he called for eliminating regulatory agencies. In urging that there were “several ways to skin even a reforming cat,” Stigler hoped to draw his fellow neoliberals’ attention to that fact that there were alternative means of advancing neoliberal aims. Notwithstanding Friedman’s public claims, it was perfectly possible to do so by keeping regulatory agencies in place so long as regulators were forced to follow cost-benefit procedures and neoliberal scholars had identified the relevant costs and benefits for them: The appraisal of the achievements of a regulatory body is not impossible: a whole series of such appraisals is gradually developing an arsenal of techniques for measurement. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 153

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on internal neoliberal varieties and debates (e.g., Tim Mitchell’s work on how economists’ expertise reorganizes the economy through auditing and metrics rather than deregulation alone).
• DEFINE: Distinguishes the Stiglerian ‘regulatory capture via measurement’ variant from the crude Friedmanite deregulation caricature.