Quote :

"banning for-profit corporations from influencing candidates would solve all of these problems and many more."

How would you suggest anyone do that? They went to school together. They don't need to contribute money to get their close friends to listen to them. It is the rest of us, the political outsiders, that have nothing to offer politicians but money. Ban money and all you've done is eliminate what little competition there is for political influence.

5/9/2012 5:51:48 PM

Yes... every single politician went to school with every single business leader and executive. That makes perfect sense as long as you don't think about it at all, which you obviously didn't.

5/9/2012 10:16:30 PM

So it is your opinion that no politician has ever met a business leader or someone that has?

There are many forms of political influence. Being willing to publicly donate money in full view of voters is just perhaps the least offensive form there is.

5/9/2012 11:32:31 PM

Quote :

". Would Apple have been allowed to flourish if Microsoft hadn't been slapped with antitrust lawsuits? "

Apple flourished because A) microsoft bailed them out, B) ipods (a market microsoft was not in), and C) steve jobs coming back and getting them on track. Also microsoft and apple probably have a pretty big patent sharing deal that helps them both out.

The anti-trust case around microsoft was about microsoft selling licenses to OEMs (dell, hp, etc...) for cheaper than microsofts (non-existant) competitors could sell their own software to OEMs. The result of the antitrust case was that microsoft had to open up certain microsoft protocols (which was bullshit) and nothing really ever came of it. I think the samba project might have gotten help from it (even though its still trash). Its actually probably worse that microsoft was forced to open some of their stuff because it meant that anyone using microsoft's protocols or APIs was basically just adding to the microsoft ecosystem. Theres still no real alternative for network file sharing as good as SMB. No ones tried to develop one because even samba is Good Enough™.

Microsoft is a great example of a natural monopoly. There was no real competition to windows or office. There were all kinds of competitors, but they all sucked. Netscape is a great example. It was THE webbrowser for the longest time and then IE came out and it was leaps and bounds better than netscape so people stopped using netscape. Microsoft never did anything to harm netscapes business, they just made a better product. And then when microsoft stopped working on IE other browsers became popular. And again, microsoft never did anything to stop them from working on windows. In fact most 3rd party browsers take advantage of the same windows APIs that IE does.

So tl;dr answer to your question: Apples success is due in part to microsoft but is mostly a result of steve jobs long term planning. If the antitrust case against microsoft had never happened there'd probably be no change in the overall makeup of the software industry.

In fact, if you really wanted to worry the biggest threat to competition is probably from apple which has a huge chunk of cash (untaxed, btw) that could be used to buy up just about anything. They currently use it to buy up massive inventories of future parts. ex: the type of flash used in their devices isnt available to any other company because apple owns all the future supply for it for years. That prevents other device makers from competing on certain hardware specs and is more anti-competition than anything microsoft ever did. not that its really that big of a deal.

5/10/2012 12:04:00 AM

incidentally that last bit (the future supply bit) is exactly how soft soap came about

5/10/2012 2:14:16 AM

Quote :

"What would have happened if Microsoft had been allowed to buy up all the start-ups in the 90s without the government stepping in?"

The surest way to make sure there will be more of something available in the future is to buy it. What do you think will happen if you give money and free-time to someone that just recently made big bucks starting a start-up? They'll start a start-up!

History is full of businesses trying to reduce competition by constantly buying out their competitors. It never ends well for them, as once the word gets out everyone that can races to be their competitor. Not because they expect to operate profitably, they don't, but because they hope to become enough of a nuisance to get the big guy to buy them out.

Quote :

"Monopolies are most readily formed when there is government complacency."

Has never happened in recorded human history. Monopolies are only ever formed when there is government complicity, often through the enforcement of patents and copyrights.

Given all the litigation Apple is launching against its would-be competitors, I'd say it is safe to say Apple is struggling to maintain its government enforced monopoly. Imagine this: Apple has a government granted monopoly, yet competitors are still flocking to compete against them. More competitors than the government court system can manage to squash. How can you look at this and think natural monopolies are common enough to need redesigning the whole system? I agree there is not enough market competition, so we should make it harder to drag your competitors into court. Make patents harder, or even impossible, to obtain.

Quote :

"Or employing an army of hackers and spies to steal their information even more cheaply and get it to market faster?"

This is where federalism comes in. While Microsoft is big in its home-town, my company is located in a different political district. As such, while Microsoft no doubt dominates its own political district and can steal whatever it wants there, I dominate mine, so Microsoft employees trying to harass my business get arrested. Of course, as the Federal Government has grown we today seriously need to worry that Microsoft can get a free pass thanks to its political influence while our state and local officials are powerless to investigate.

5/10/2012 9:39:19 AM

Quote :

"Has never happened in recorded human history. Monopolies are only ever formed when there is government complicity, often through the enforcement of patents and copyrights."

De Beers had a worldwide monopoly on diamonds for a very long time. They were able to buy up competitors or use price fixing strategies to corner the market for almost an entire century, keep in mind this was WORLDWIDE, it had nothing to do with any one corrupt government, although they were able to manipulate those governments when they tried to come at them with anti-trust cases.

Something that you are saying has never existed actually existed for a century, and has really only now started to be broken into by Alrossa over the last decade.

5/10/2012 10:08:14 AM

^ To be fair, the De Beers influenced and manipulated one government well before they were a glob-spanning consortium (when it was dominant solely due to the unparallelled richness of its Kimberly mines). They were able to use their wealth and control of several papers to get military resources redirected to protect their besieged mines by having them diverted from more strategic resources. When the military commanders involved disagreed, Cecil Rhodes even had papers under his control print information which compromised the military forces. Still this probably only counts as "government complicity" in the sense being discussed if you consider uprisings and sieges to be natural market forces.

Ultimately paying for lobbying and press favorable to Cecil Rhodes business interests influenced the major war plans for the British military in South Africa; it did this to such a degree that the general in command of seizing the primary Boer stronghold was ordered to split his forces and relieve the besieged mines instead of taking the more valuable and decisive objective in Naatal. At the cost of the lives of thousands of British soldiers, the siege of Kimberly was prevented from being successful. Although the siege would not be truly broken until much later in the war, the influence exerted by mr Rhodes preserved the cornerstone of his company's dominance and was due to their abiilty to exert control over one nation - which came at the cost of some of the largest British casualties and cavalry losses in their history.

But yeah that's not so much about their being to exist solely because of their ability to use and corrupt governments to gain advantage over comeptitors. That's more about the ability of powerful monetary entities to use the press and their own lobbying power to convince nations to shed blood and treasure in ways that don't necessarily represent the best national interest and sometimes run counter to it. The monopoly formed in the absense of government largess or complicity, but even so and in the days of Empire they were still able to pay to have soldiers die for them. So yeah even I guess even powerful extra-national interests that grow in a frontier environment can turn nations to cause.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 10:53 AM. Reason : k]

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 10:56 AM. Reason : g]

5/10/2012 10:49:38 AM

De Beers did not have a monopoly. They did not own every single mine on the planet. They did not even own all the mines in Africa. But they were able to use their political influence over African governments to prevent new mines from opening up. And what ^ said.

But this has nothing to do with this discussion, as Diamonds are rare and were made that way by God, not "government complacency" as IMS stated.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 3:38 PM. Reason : .,.]

5/10/2012 3:37:06 PM

Quote :

"Diamonds are rare and were made that way by God"

This is a joke, right?

5/10/2012 4:44:30 PM

Quote :

"De Beers did not have a monopoly."

They did. They singlehandedly controlled the trade of diamonds for almost a century.

Quote :

"But they were able to use their political influence over African governments to prevent new mines from opening up. And what ^ said."

They used a lot of methods. They used governments sometimes, they used warlords sometimes, they used good ole textbook anti-competitive practices other times.

Quote :

"Diamonds are rare and were made that way by God"

Ironically, they weren't ever really that rare. They also weren't really ever in high demand until De Beers got the monopoly. After that they were able to actually embed the demand for diamonds in different cultures around the world to create a billion dollar industry out of thin air.

That was just an interesting side note. EVERYTHING is rare to some degree, and I suppose you could credit god for it if you like.

[Edited on May 10, 2012 at 5:12 PM. Reason : ]

5/10/2012 5:10:55 PM

^ Yeah the myth of diamonds being rare and its persistence to the point where someone would call it a fact of nature created by God even to this day is testiment to how effective De Beers was at controlling the market and creating the entirely artificial demand for the high quality non-industrial gems. Heck a De Beers chariman once said that "diamonds
are intrinsically worthless." But yeah, interesting side story more than anything else.

5/10/2012 5:31:33 PM

Franciscan University of Steubenville drops student health plan over HHS mandate

Quote :

" An employee of the university, Tom Crowe, wrote his employer’s message was brisk and clear: “We. Will. Not. Comply. And our students are the first one who will feel the pinch.”"

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/franciscan-university-of-steubenville-drops-student-health-plan-over-hhs-ma

5/18/2012 2:56:41 PM