The government’s harassment of Microsoft has uncorked a gusher of silly journalism. On May 19, even the Wall Street Journal joined the flow. Alan Murray’s front-page essay, “Reading Rockefeller and Busting Up Trusts,” is a soup of errors and strained logic.

Murray is horrified by accounts of Standard Oil’s large size and Rockefeller’s “obsession for precision, tidiness and order.” It’s true that Rockefeller once controlled 90 percent of the oil-refining business. And he believed that several large oil companies would better serve producers and consumers than would hundreds of small companies.

But then Murray says, “Rockefeller was driven not to compete, but to crush competition. Only after the government busted the Standard Oil trust [in 1911] did anything like free-market competition return.” Murray is wrong on several counts.

First, Rockefeller didn’t crush competition. Most of his competitors crushed themselves. Sure, they extracted kerosene from their oil, but they did not imagine that the byproducts had value. Rockefeller’s rival refiners dumped gasoline into the Cuyahoga River and threw out other byproducts such as naphtha and benzol. The key to Rockefeller’s success was finding uses for all of the elements in a barrel of oil—and then giving customers the best service at the lowest price.

Contrary to Murray’s implication, Rockefeller never had a monopoly. Dozens of other oil companies constantly competed with him—which was perfectly fine with Rockefeller. “Competitors we must have, we must have,” said Rockefeller’s partner Charles Pratt. “If we absorb them, be sure it will bring up another.” And Rockefeller never engaged in predatory price-cutting, as economist John McGee has persuasively shown, because doing so would have hurt in the long run.

Of course, refiners who sold expensive oil often went broke. But even some of them were happy to be bought out by Rockefeller in return for rapidly appreciating stock in Standard Oil. One of the unhappy refiners was Ida Tarbell’s father, who went out of business when customers stopped buying his high-priced oil. Ida Tarbell scathingly criticized Rockefeller in her history of Standard Oil, which sold widely and seems to have influenced the antitrust division.

What if Rockefeller had been less efficient? That might have kept Mr. Tarbell in business, but only temporarily. By the mid-1880s, the Russians had discovered deep, rich, and plentiful oil deposits at Baku. They then sold oil throughout Europe and elsewhere at prices so low that Rockefeller himself strained to survive. Only the most efficient could win the kerosene dollars of picky customers in this new world market. Rockefeller’s innovative abilities ensured a competitive American oil industry.

In light of that stiff Russian competition, Murray is especially foolish when he talks about free-market competition returning “only after the government busted the Standard Oil trust.” The free market worked well for consumers all over the world; oil prices steadily fell before 1911.

Even inside America, the free market, not government, was increasing competition in the early 1900s. Oil was discovered in Texas in 1901, but Standard Oil decided to drill elsewhere. Companies throughout Texas then formed to sell the newly discovered oil.

While the government prosecuted and convicted Standard Oil for allegedly restraining trade, one of Standard’s new competitors, Gulf Oil, built pipelines from Texas to Oklahoma, experimented with offshore drilling, and developed the corner service station. “Thus even before the breakup of the combination,” historians Ralph and Muriel Hidy observe, “the process of whittling Standard Oil down to reasonable size within the industry was already far advanced.”

There’s a general lesson here: the ability of people to exchange private-property rights within free markets is an effective anti-monopoly policy. But despite the inability of economic historians to uncover much evidence that antitrust legislation has ever helped consumers, most of today’s journalists share Murray’s intuition that active antitrust enforcement is necessary to prevent monopoly.

The reason for this flawed intuition is easily identified: each journalist is, well, a journalist. Because the typical journalist (like the typical politician, bureaucrat, and judge) isn’t an entrepreneur, he cannot imagine the commercial and industrial world being much different from what it is today. So the typical journalist sees Microsoft’s large market share today in operating-system software and unimaginatively laments, “Oh, dear! The only hope is for government to mandate that Microsoft stand aside and make room for its rivals. Otherwise, Microsoft will remain forever dominant.”

Imagining how a new product or new firm can successfully challenge Microsoft is indeed difficult—in the same way that all entrepreneurial activity is difficult. Only one or a handful of people ever “sees” the promise of any particular commercial or industrial advance. If this weren’t true—if, instead, the ability to envision and implement market-improving changes were widespread—then Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and the other entrepreneurs who over the years have created market-improving changes would never have become household names. And they certainly wouldn’t have earned much more wealth than the rest of us.

The essence of a competitive market economy is that it encourages each person with a vision of how consumers can be better served to act on that vision, even though literally no one else in the world might share it. All it takes is a single imaginative individual with a creative idea to make an established industry obsolete.

Of course, for anyone to bet on such visions requires not only personal gumption, but the potential for a big payoff. We celebrate today the entrepreneurs whose visions proved successful. But we don’t celebrate, or even know of, the much larger group of entrepreneurs whose visions failed. There’s no shame in these failures. Indeed, each performed a service by warning others of what consumers really didn’t want, or of what methods of production really wouldn’t work.

Like it or not, too few sane people will invest their wealth—not to mention their hearts and souls—in revolutionary new products or production processes without the possibility of handsome payoffs. Fortunately, America remains a country that permits entrepreneurs to reap (most of) the fruits of their successes.

The market’s “process of creative destruction” (as economist Joseph Schumpeter called it) replaced the horse and buggy with the automobile—just as it replaced chamber pots and outhouses with indoor plumbing, typewriters with personal computers, telegraphs with telephones, passenger rail travel with air travel, and iron-lung machines with an effective vaccine against polio. It isn’t even conceivable that salaried bureaucrats could have envisioned these and the millions of other innovations that make modern life possible.

As James DeLong wrote in the May 20 Los Angeles Times, “Gates is worth decabillions in part because he had a few big visions . . . but equally important has been his embrace of the fluidity of the future and an awesome ability to react to surprises. This is the opposite of the bureaucratic mind, which cannot stand uncertainty and fluidity and so makes the future predictable by stifling it.”

Microsoft will eventually be replaced by a rival that better meets consumer demands. But the only sure way we’ll know when this rival has arrived is by leaving the decision up to consumers. Alan Murray’s belief that bureaucrats and judges can outguess the competitive market process just ain’t so.