But originalism became a crude and self-justifying meme that the right used, from the 1980s on, simply to serve its own interests and prejudices. Originalism’s most important hidden agenda was to keep courts and judges completely out of the business of business, as if what worked for the U.S. economy for its first century, before modern corporations existed, was how things should work today. It was like the Friedman Doctrine, which turned a reasonable capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter).
