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I reside in Indian River County, Florida, where jury duty is mandated by statute, as in most states. This means that the courts in the County are authorized to “summon” specific individuals for service in civil and criminal proceedings as jurors. A failure to respond to the jury duty summons will be considered a “contempt of court”; and a fine not

Dominick Armentano, author of Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure , is a leading antitrust theorist of the Austrian School. His main theoretical and political arguments are beautifully summarized in the newly issued Antitrust: The Case for Repeal . This new edition addresses the main antitrust controversies of our time,

The recent “findings of fact” and ruling by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that Microsoft violated antitrust laws is a travesty of economic reasoning and common sense justice. Jackson accepted the bulk of the government’s argument that Microsoft was a monopoly in the relevant market and that they engaged in “anti-competitive” practices to enhance

Joel Klein, Assistant Attorney General and round-one winner over Microsoft, is certainly puffed up these days and quite carried away with himself. He recently told a London gathering of the American Bar Association faithful that antitrust regulation is now, get this, the only “legitimate form of government intervention.” Oh, really? Klein also

The high profile case against Microsoft and the rejection by federal regulators of the WorldCom-Sprint combination has again focused critical attention on the efficacy of antitrust policy. In WorldCom-Sprint, the FTC charged that the merger would have increased concentration in long-distance telecommunications and created “barriers to entry” that

For those who thought that the Microsoft antitrust nonsense was over, think again. In March of 2004 Microsoft was fined a record $648 million by the European Commission for exercising its (alleged) monopoly power in the operating systems market. The most important element of that alleged monopoly power was Microsoft’s free inclusion of its

Presidential election years usually are not recessionary but next year will be an exception. Several economic factors are colliding in an almost perfect storm to markedly slow the general economy and the stock market. The most important signal flashing recession is, of course, the subprime mortgage fiasco. After years of monetary inflation on the

I assert that the most intelligent reality show on TV is the History Channel’s Pawn Stars . It’s a capitalistic feast for a free market junkie like me. The basics of the show are fairly straightforward: Rick Harrison and several family members own a pawn shop in Las Vegas. In each episode, various people enter the establishment and attempt to sell

One of the most controversial areas in Austrian economics, and one where even long-established Austrian theorists differ sharply, is monopoly theory. Indeed, as we shall see below, the differences are not merely semantic, nor are they confined to detail or some minor theoretical implication. Rather, there are major and fundamental disagreements

Article one Section 8 of the U S Constitution states that the “congress shall have the power to regulate commerce among the several states.” This so-called “commerce clause” is the legal bedrock for all federal regulation of business activity that crosses state lines. Every piece of federal economic regulation from the Sherman Antitrust Act