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.