Monopoly and Competition

In a free market, it is wholly unwarranted. Brad Edmonds considers three cases.

Just as the antitrust suit seems to be burning itself out, the enemies of Microsoft have launched another sneak attack, writes Lew Rockwell.

During the seemingly endless debate over the government's treatment of Microsoft, the consensus seems to be that this is mostly a battle over ideas, including the role of government in economic matters. Whenever the subject of "self interest" appears, it usually deals with Microsoft's competitors that stand to gain from the destruction and looting of that software company.

The Heritage Foundation is no flaming libertarian organization. Not for them the radical privatization of such things as bodies of water, roads, even social security, much less courts, armies, and police.

Fifty years ago, the court broke the movie industry into two parts. The result was disastrous for consumers.

The Microsoft and WorldCom-Sprint cases show the need to distinguish legal from economic barriers. 

It's trendy to decry competition as socially destructive. The reverse is true, argues Tibor Machan.  

Despite the many illustrious forerunners in its six-hundred year prehistory, Carl Menger (1840-1921) was the true and sole founder of the Austrian school of economics proper. He merits this title if for no other reason than that he created the system of value and price theory that constitutes the core of Austrian economic theory. But Menger did more than this: he also originated and consistently applied the correct, praxeological method for pursuing theoretical research in economics. Thus in its method and core theory, Austrian economics always was and will forever remain Mengerian economics.

In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek warned that the rule of law could evolve into the rule of despotism unless the rules that are enforced by the state are known, certain, and prospective rather than retrospective. Throughout history, a hallmark of governmental tyranny has been the opposite kind of behavior: random arrests and incarceration for breaking "laws" that the alleged lawbreakers had no way of knowing about; constantly shifting definitions of what is legal and what is not; and sudden announcements that behavior which was thought for years to be legal and proper was illegal.

Clinton's antitrust man calls for the creation of a global antitrust authority. But antitrust is never legitimate, says D.T. Armentano, especially not on a global level.