All Posts Tagged With: "Microsoft"

Invisible Hand Obsolete?

Allen Murray’s Wall Street Journal article “Pushing Adam Smith Past the Millennium” (June 21, 1999) purports to discuss the relevancy of Adam Smith’s invisible hand for the 21st century. In reality, Murray is not talking about Smith or his invisible-hand metaphor at all. The assumption beneath his conclusion that “Smith’s ideas will need some rethinking [...]

1Nov1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

Who’s Locked In to What?

Politicians and bureaucrats are prone to overemphasize problems with the world and to propose command-and-control “solutions.” Economists, sad to say, have aided and abetted that mindset with a series of suspect theories of how markets are doomed to perform inadequately. Thankfully, not all economists have played this game. Many of the better ones have done [...]

1Oct1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Immorality of Antitrust Law

D. T. Armentano is professor emeritus in economics at the University of Hartford and the author of Antitrust: The Case for Repeal (Mises Institute, 1999). The economic inefficiencies associated with antitrust law enforcement are now generally acknowledged. The regulation of mergers and acquisitions hampers the efficient reallocation of corporate assets. The antitrust regulation of product [...]

1Aug1999 | | 8 comments | Continued

Opening Pandora’s Box

Dan Fylstra has been involved in the PC industry since its inception. He was founding associate editor of BYTE Magazine in 1975, and founder of VisiCorp in 1979. He is currently president of the PC software vendor Frontline Systems, Inc. This is excerpted from a longer “open letter” distributed on the Internet. Last year, Netscape [...]

1Nov1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

It Just Ain’t So!

Antitrust, now over a century old in the United States, has always had its supporters and critics. In the 1970s, however, a group of conservative scholars, including Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook (who are now federal judges) and Robert Bork (now a retired federal judge), overwhelmed the existing consensus with devastating economic arguments and dramatically [...]

1Oct1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

It Just Ain’t So!

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 [...]

1Sep1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Arrogant Antitrusters

Here’s a quiz. I’ll first give you background facts, then ask you a question. Please answer “yes” or “no.” Facts: I have no experience in, or knowledge about, running a dry-cleaning establishment. I’m an economist who has spent his career teaching economics. My only experience with dry-cleaning firms is that I use them to clean [...]

1Aug1998 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Ghost of John D. Rockefeller

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on competitiveness in the computer industry last March, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was compared to the infamous “robber baron” John D. Rockefeller and his company likened to the Standard Oil Company of the late nineteenth century. Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky made a similar analogy in a Washington [...]

1Jun1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Bill Gates, Philanthropist

Let’s review the familiar refrains on charitable giving. Social democrats criticize tycoons for not giving more of their wealth to charities. Business people are repeatedly admonished to “give something back.” The implication is that commercial profits are taken from others, and decency demands that the lucky takers return at least part of their booty to [...]

1Jan1998 | | 0 comments | Continued
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