The most unabashed worship of corporate dominance that I've read in a long time comes courtesy of Investor's Business Daily, here. Read it if you think you can stand it. To give you a taste, here's the lede:
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) , a company that has enriched millions and provided an immeasurable boost to the global economy, is being treated like a criminal in Europe ...
An EU court in Luxembourg ruled Monday against Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's shakedown of Bill Gates' software giant. It all stems from March 2004, when the EU's unelected bureaucracy fined Microsoft more than $600 million and directed it to share its code with competitors.
I know I spend hours every week counting the ways in which Microsoft has enriched me: critical security patches for broken software, system hangs and crashes, price gouging, stifling innovation, and so on. What personality flaw makes these socialist Europeans unable to see that Microsoft's sole effect has been to make our lives better?
According to IBD, it's seething resentment of the size and success of our benevolent god--though these scheming bureaucrats are careful to disguise their true feelings with arcane legal terminology:
The justification for the shabby treatment of a company that has done nothing but increase the world's prosperity is that it was too big and too successful. Regulators and lawyers avoid that sort of language, though, and instead use weasel words such as "monopoly," "market dominance," "dominant position" and "abuse" to rationalize and enforce vague and antiquated antitrust laws.
Yes, just as government officials refused to admit that they simply felt an irrational animosity toward Jeffrey Dahmer and instead used weasel words such as "mass murder," "necrophilia," and "cannibalism" to justify their obstruction of his innovative approach to interpersonal relationships. As a reality check about the "nothing" that Microsoft has done, here's the concluding point of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact against Microsoft from 1999:
412. Most harmful of all is the message that Microsoft's actions have conveyed to every enterprise with the potential to innovate in the computer industry. Through its conduct toward Netscape, IBM, Compaq, Intel, and others, Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products. Microsoft's past success in hurting such companies and stifling innovation deters investment in technologies and businesses that exhibit the potential to threaten Microsoft. The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest.
Compare this paragraph (and the extensive evidence that Jackson adduces to support it) with IBD's version of reality:
Regulators and lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic who take down big companies because they feel the need to justify their jobs or are guided by a compulsion to shape the world around their ideals are the enemies of innovation.
When the reward of success is legal trouble, punitive fines and a possible company breakup, the incentive to innovate with an eye on growth and profit is curbed.
This last talking point--regularly invoked by the Uncle Toms of corporate control of our world--is one of my all-time favorites: that corporate officers, deeply discouraged by [taxation, enforcement of the law, government regulation, the inability to treat workers the way they did in the 1800s, etc, etc], will simply give up on their relentless pursuit of profit and leave us all foundering in a world bereft of ever-bigger plasma screen HDTVs. Ah, if only that were true.
The fact is that the judgments against Microsoft in the US and Europe have benefited all of us by forcing Microsoft--and other companies as well--to treat the laws that limit their power a little more seriously. And anything that serves to curb corporate power, no matter how slightly, is a step in the right direction.
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