A recent submission to the Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship, and the Law looks at the “Brokaw bill” of 2016 and at the facts said to have motivated it. There are lessons to be drawn from this about how things work in the world, about how the managers of failed enterprises like to think they work, and about who politicians believe. In March 2016, Sens Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bill to “increase transparency and strengthen oversight of activist hedge funds.” Bernie Sanders, then in the midst of a campaign for the Democratic nomination for POTUS, signed on as a co-sponsor. The proposal was said to have been inspired by the cloture (five years before) of a paper mill in Brokaw, Wisconsin. That paper mill had provided jobs to some of Senator Baldwin’s constituents for years. According to Baldwin and Merkley, the mill closed because a predatory activist hedge fund bought control of the Wausau Paper Company and demanded immediate returns “at th...
