news you can use

Antitrust Heresy




Published 15 July 2002



Joan of Arc, contrary to legend, was not toasted at the stake for witchcraft.  She was char-grilled for heresy.  That may sound like abstruse hair-splitting, but thin sliced follicles were the stock in trade of medieval logic (how many angels can tap dance on a pinhead?)  At the risk of over simplifying, she was charged with the crimes of being headstrong and refusing to bow to the judgments of the power elites.



But this isn't about the Maid of Orleans.  I mention her circumstance only as an historical reference point for modern America's version of heresy - antitrust law.  The Microsoft antitrust trial-by-fire (there's no attempt here to canonize St. Bill, so don't have a bovine moment) keeps popping up in the news like a Whack-a-Mole game at Chuck E. Cheese's.  As far as I can tell, MS hasn't been charged with fraud or coercion, the only real crimes recognized by libertarians because they are the only kinds of crimes that involve real, bona fide, actual, tangible, objectively identifiable victims as opposed to various nonexistent abstruse collective plaintiffs such as society or the people or the state or the children.



If the Redmond crew took hostages at gunpoint or ran a pyramid scam (like Social Security) or planted a severed nag's head on a prospective business partner's spring fresh bedcovers to get his name on a contract, they need to be charged with felonies.  If they ripped off trademarks or copyrights there's a whole lawyering class salivating to file lawsuits.  That's what criminal and civil courts are for.  But the court of antitrust, a purely political artifice, has no double jeopardy protections.  If the feds don't get you the states move in and resume the same Whack-a-Mole game.  How many times will Microsoft be tried for the same heresies?  Is a mass of money-grubbing mayors next?  Or a coalition of cash-hungry county commissioners?



So what actual high crimes and misdemeanors has Microsoft been accused of?  When you lash the charges to a stake and burn off the fat, they all boil down to being headstrong and refusing to bow to the judgments of the power elites.  Specifically, the power elite's definition du jour of unfair business practices.  The antitrust concept of fair, like heresy, can mean anything anyone anywhere in any courtroom under any administration in any epoch wants it to mean as long as one gets, as Ste. Joan's enemies got, the outcome one intends to get.  I quit donating to United Way when they started babbling that everyone should give their fair share.  Guess who decided what my fair share was.  And we still hear government addicts demanding that we pay our fair share of taxes.  Again, guess who gets to define fair.



Here's the underlying medieval logic that goes into the abstruse concept of unfair business practices.  If your company sells products for less than its competitors, you're guilty of trying to run them out of business.  If you sell for more than your competitors, you're gouging the public.  If you sell for the same price as your competitors, you're guilty of collusion, complicity, conspiracy, deception, price-fixing, racketeering, causing a plague of boils and molesting puppies.  Heresies all.



What about charges of monopoly?  The government isn't concerned about monopolies unless it's not one of their own monopolies.  Private monopolies are heresies.  Government monopolies are fair.  I don't recall any Justice Department antitrust suits against the first class postal monopoly or the Amtrak monopoly or the various state lottery monopolies.  Monopoly, like fair, is whatever the power elites decide it is.



A lot of people harbor a witch-burning hatred of Microsoft, based not on any criminal wrongdoing involving threats of or actual use of fraud or coercion but rather on their hardnosed business practices.  What MS did was the same things any of their competitors could have done if they had been bright enough to do them first.  We used to admire business people for being hardnosed.  Now people want to punish Microsoft for being unfair based on their own subjective definitions of unfair.  Jeanne d'arc committed the heresy of being successful.  Microsoft committed the heresy of being successful.



If you don't like Microsoft, fine.  Don't like them.  But don't cheer for the medieval witch burners who create abstruse hair-splitting definitions of fair and then apply them to whomever they or their corporate co-barbequers don't like.



Libertarians know this: any government powerful enough to shish-ka-bob Microsoft is powerful enough to skewer us all.  Hold onto your marshmallows.



- by Garry Reed

Design copyright Scars Publications and Design. Copyright of individual pieces remain with the author. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...