Thomas DiLorenzo’s letter in defense of Microsoft appears in the Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, July 29, 1998: Robert Bork is decades behind the times in antitrust scholarship if he believes there is no efficiency rationale for product bundling (”it produces no significant efficiencies”) or exclusive dealing contracts (”their sole function is to
[This article originally appeared in the Austrian Economics Newsletter , Summer 1991, pp. 1–6. You read can also read it in PDF .] Today regulation is generally recognized as a mechanism by which special interests lobby the government to create barriers to entry or other special privileges. Research has shown, for example, that the Civil
The judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial, Thomas Penfield Jackson, recently stated that he “didn’t see a distinction” between Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The judge is right, but for the wrong reasons. Like Gates, Rockefeller was the victim of a vindictive political assault on his company for
Joel Klein, the third-rate lawyer/political hack who is in charge of the government’s Microsoft persecution, recently tried to rationalize the lawsuit by saying that it was in keeping with the long history of consumer protection regulation, beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In reality, the history of antitrust has been a history of
When Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson “ordered, adjudged, and decreed” the breakup of Microsoft into two separate companies he effectively replaced Bill Gates with government lawyer Joel Klein as the chief decision maker of the Microsoft Corporation. The Judge accepted almost verbatim the Clinton administration’s breakup proposal, authored by Klein
The hordes of lawyers that Al Gore has employed to help him try to overturn the presidential election through voter fraud are the latest example of how the rule of law is being destroyed. Florida election laws are clear as a bell in disallowing hand recounts unless there is fraud or machine failure, which Gore is not claiming is the case. The
A recent trip to Santa Monica, California, provided me with a clear explanation of why Californians, despite all their wealth, talent, and resourcefulness, have the energy supply system of a Third World country. Like so many tiny Latin American dictatorships, or the outer provinces of India, Californians can no longer rely on a steady supply of
America’s emergency room physicians met recently for their annual convention and emerged with their well-scrubbed hands extended and begging for government handouts. Terrorism, they say, means that taxpayers will have to hand over additional billions of dollars to the emergency rooms of America’s hospitals. Additional tax dollars would not be
Both of the major political parties in the U.S. long ago adopted the rhetoric of the socialist Left with regard to tax deductions. The mortgage interest deduction, the state and local taxes deduction, and all others, are denigrated either as “loopholes” that need to be slammed shut or as sources of needless confusion. A November 8, 2004
Wal-Mart-hating interventionists are running out of reasons to hate Wal-Mart. Incapable of making any kind of coherent argument that America’s biggest retailer is harmful to consumers or workers, they are now rewriting American business history — including the history of antitrust regulation — to vent their hatred of an institution that has done
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.