Recent headlines speak volumes about the hypocrisy of the state. On the one hand, we have state persecution of private firms for collusion, price-fixing, monopolization, etc., e.g. LG, Sharp plead guilty to LCD price-fixing, take $585m fine; antitrust actions against Microsoft, both in the US and Europe (EU hits Microsoft with record 899 million euro antitrust fine); and as I noted in The Schizo Feds: Patent Monopolies and the FTC, the state grants patent monopolies and then uses antitrust law to attack the beneficiaries of those monopolies.
And on the other hand, we have state monopoly-granting patent office collusion: Blueprint Laid Out for Work-Sharing Among Five Intellectual Property Offices, reporting that “The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced the development of a blueprint for work sharing among five major intellectual property offices (IP5) to address the common challenges they are currently facing. The heads of the IP5 met at Jeju, Korea, on October 27 and 28, 2008, to discuss a shared vision for work sharing and collaboration.”
And we have the G20 nations colluding (”US President George W. Bush said Thursday that world leaders will ‘lay the foundation for reforms’ at global economic crisis talks this week....”), not to mention “coordination” by the world’s central banks (Fed, European Banks Coordinate Interest Rate Cut; Central Banks Coordinate Global Cut in Interest Rates; EU Leaders Vow to Coordinate Response to Finance Crisis).
Utter hypocrisy--and, as usual, exactly backwards: the state outlaws private “collusion” while engaging in global collusion itself, when, as Rothbard shows, only states are able to form genuine monopolies in the first place. (See Man, Economy, and State, ch. 10; also Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, ch. 9.)
