Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Microsoft getting revenge after Google's anti-trust piling on

The Wall Street Journal printed a long front-page article yesterday on Microsoft's back-door dealing to have lawsuits brought against Google for alleged "anti-trust" violations. In other words, Microsoft is jealous, is beaten, is whining, and is going after Google with the guns of government.

This is wretched, of course, and straight out of "Atlas Shrugged." But Google committed a similar breach of morality against Microsoft just last year when Google piled on in a European Union investigation against Microsoft and its browser. Here's my letter to the WSJ editor on the article.

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The Monday article on Google and Microsoft sparring over antitrust issues had my full empathy for Google until, halfway through the article, I was reminded by the writers that Google had piled on during the European Union’s immoral crusade against Microsoft’s private property in 2009.

I recollect now that ignominious moment when Google manqué decided to join the wolves attacking a giant simply because the giant had earned its size by privately (not by government fiat) selling products and services that millions of people around the world freely chose to buy, including an attached browser.

This type of hypocrisy is what happens to many of even the best businesses because of anti-trust demagoguery, wherein government officials arbitrarily decide when a company has allegedly gotten too big for its britches, when a company has allegedly become too successful and still presumes (Imagine that!) to set its own terms for sale instead of a demagogue.

The Sherman anti-trust act of 1890 and its wretched progeny have left big business to the immoral whimsy of the concentration camp guard for too long. All anti-trust legislation must be abolished – primarily to honor private property, but also to take away a bludgeon whose only purpose is to make big men submit and to line the pockets of bureaucrats with booty they enjoy calling “fines.”

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