With its antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the FTC’s goal is to force the sale of WhatsApp and Instagram, Meta’s up-to-now most successful acquisitions. Wise minds inside the Trump administration will hopefully choose to drop a suit first introduced during by a Biden administration reflexively disdainful of big.

While the economic boom of the 1980s is frequently explained as a reversal of the high-tax, inflationary economic policies that prevailed in the 1960s and 70s, arguably just as important to 80s prosperity was a relentless unwinding of lumbering conglomerates formed in the decades before. It’s something to keep in mind as April 14th (when the court battle is set to begin) inches ever closer.

To clarify the errors underlying the FTC’s actions, it’s useful to remember the accepted wisdom of the 60s and 70s, that large corporations should grow ever larger through the purchase of all sorts of businesses unrelated to a corporation’s existing mission or management know-how. A largely flat Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1966 to 1982 exists to this day as a market signal that investors weren’t much impressed by the conglomerate craze.

The good news is that markets invariably correct course, and in the 1980s they did just that. Conventional business wisdom from the 1960s and 70s was rejected in resounding fashion as intrepid investors bought the conglomerates with an eye on liberating the undermanaged and underutilized businesses under their control. While critics referred to the proliferation of hostile takeovers as a piece-by-piece selloff of “Corporate America,” surging equity markets suggested something else entirely.