I have dealt
with the absurdity of antitrust before. Since the earlier article focused mostly on history,
it seemed prudent to update the story.
North Dakota
senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, both Democrats, are crusading
on behalf of the family farm--or so they say. "We are losing
family farmers at a record pace" and "We must break up concentration,
prevent new concentration."
Of course,
it is never explained what is inherently bad about big companies
owning farm land, or why the government should interfere in
the legal selling of land.
After all,
this is politics, and what better way to earn some cheap points
with your constituents than by attacking the big bad corporations?
There is, though, the problem of answering the same constituent,
who may some day want to sell his land to the mega company and
then retire. What do you say then? Sorry, we have a law that
protects you from that?
Fortunately,
for Conrad and Dorgan, that question has not come up yet, and
even when it does, will only affect "isolated" cases. (Never
mind that everything that happens to any particular individual
is an isolated case.)
Indeed,
these days antitrust is ONLY about politics. My earlier article
touched on the influence of possibly well-meaning social reformers,
but that aspect--if it ever existed--is long gone.
Consider
the Department of Justice's investigation of Visa USA and Mastercard
International, that, between the two of them, control about
75% of the credit card business. Could it possibly be inspired
because Clinton pal Vernon Jordan is on the board of American
Express?
And what
about Microsoft? Who besides their competitors would stand to
gain from some sort of break up of this extremely successful
company?
Well, one
of the loudest anti-Microsoft voices in the Senate happens to
be none other than Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, and Utah
is the home of Novell. Just a coincidence? Then why did Hatch
threaten to create a federal commission to regulate the computer
industry if Microsoft didn't settle with Justice? That goes
well beyond a mere antitrust attack on one company. Heck, it
takes real firepower to protect a faded icon such as Novell.
It turns
out that many Microsoft competitors, including Novell, were
making political contributions long before Bill Gates found
out how necessary it was to do so. If Uncle Bill can be faulted
for being late to jump on the Internet, at least he made a good
recovery. His getting too smart too late about dirty politics
may be permanently damaging.
Point of
order: Anyone out there still want to argue that there is a
dime's worth of difference between the two parties?
So who,
you may ask, are the winners in antitrust besides weak sister
competitors and greedy elected officials?
One would
be Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein, the head of Justice's
antitrust division. Justice is asking for--and will no doubt
get--a 15% or $16.1 million increase for its 2000 budget, and
an additional 124 staff members.
I can hardly
wait to see what more damage will be inflicted on those companies
that are on the wrong side of the current politics.
In this
emasculated American culture where one of the worst possible
sins is to be "judgmental," we let the Government handle all
of our judgments for us. Trouble is, they're usually wrong.