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Published 15 July 2002 (word count: 750)
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I mention her circumstance only as an historical reference point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
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