Monopoly and Competition

Let us just say we abolish all federal labor law. What happens then?

The Microsoft Corporation's continuing difficulties with the Department of Justice, even after an appeals court ruled in the company's favor, reveal the absurdity of attempting to apply 19th-century antitrust law to a 21st-century computer and telecommunications marketplace.

Antitrust bureaucrats have been running roughshod over free enterprise for more than a century, imposing themselves between consumers and companies at the behest of envious competitors. Antitrust sums up everything that is wrong with the state.

Former FTC Chairman James C. Miller III, tells the story of how, in the early 1980s, Chrysler head Lee Iacocca requested that the FTC block a proposed joint venture between General Motors and Toyota. The request was denied. GM and Toyota formed the New United Motor Manufacturing Corporation. Iacocca entered into his own joint venture with Mitsubishi.

Scrooge came in the form of government last year. The company Bill Gates built into the planet's leading money machine is still the target of a federal probe and a senate inquiry. The charge: anti-competitive behavior.

Today's antitrust enforcement reduces tragedy to farce. A federal judge recently upheld the Federal Trade Commission's charge that Toys R' Us conspired to prop up the price of Mr. Potato Head. Why? Because the retail outlet liked to make exclusive deals.

Mises on monopoly prices in the new Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert's closest companion is Dogbert, a philosophical pooch with the self-professed aim of world conquest.

Doctoral dissertations seldom make good books. Even the most trivial assertion in a thesis must be footnoted; and the author, much to the reader's discomfort, must demonstrate his control of his subject in excruciating detail.