From: AdmrlLocke [AdmrlLocke@aol.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 26, 1998 5:19 PM Subject: Democrat Control-Freaks GrammNet Issue 5/26/98 Dear Friend of Liberty, As you probably know, Democrats tend to want to control every facet of your life. Whether it comes to smoking, defending your right to life by exercising your right to bear arms, or just driving the car of your choice, Democrat control-freaks are fighting to stop you. In December of 1992 I joked that I hoped that by the time Clinton left office, we'd still be able to go to the bathroom without a permit from Washtington. But lo and behold, it's no joke: Clinton's federal regulatory Leviathan has decreed that all newly-installed toilets must be of the "low flush" variety. (Perhaps he's afraid that we'll all try to flush him and his fellow control-freaks.) Now Clinton and the Democrats are trying to control which web browser you use. They're trying to use the old "anti-trust" laws to overturn the choices that you and I have made in the market, substituting their will for ours. Don't be fooled: their anti-trust actions are entirely about expanding the power of Big Government. For what it's worth, I'm a Macintosh user. In fact, I'm on my third Mac. I was able to download both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator for free from their web sites. I also get a browser with American Online. The free availability of different browsers makes a hash of the government's claims that Microsoft has any sort of monopoly. In fact, Microsoft has been the monopoly-buster, and it's busted monopolies without the government's method of threating (or using) force. Microsoft has busted computer monopolies the old fashion way: by compeition. It used to be that WordPerfect dominated the market for word processing applications. But WordPerfect's makers acted like arrogant monopolists, keeping their price high and their product relatively static. So Bill Gates came along and sold a better product at a lower price, knocking WordPerfect off its lofty perch. Even Mac users now prefer Microsoft Word to all other word processing applications. It's a strange monopoly indeed which sells products which enhance the value of its competitors' products. Microsoft selling Word to Mac users would be like GM selling better turbochargers to owners of Chrysler cars. In fact, forget about WordPerfect. The biggest competition Microsoft Word faces is from older versions of itself. For instance, I still use Word 4 on my Macintosh PowerPC, even though it's not supposed to work on the PowerPC. If Gates doesn't make new versions of Word significantly better than the old versions, we won't buy the new ones. Word isn't Microsoft's only trust-buster. Apple used to have a monopoly on fun, easy-to-use operating systems. If you could point, click, and drag with a mouse, you could do almost anything on a Mac, while with DOS, you had to memorize (or look up) awkward commands to do even simple tasks. Apple acted like an arrogant monopolist, and refused to license its operating system. It charged substantially higher prices for its fun, easy-to-use computers. Then Microsoft created Windows, which lets you point and click. A funny thing happened: the price of Macs started falling. Windows wasn't a perfect substitute for the Mac OS, but it was good enough to please many would-be Mac users. After Microsoft introduced Window95--a closer, albeit still imperfect substitute for the Mac OS--the price of Macs plummeted, so that now you can actually get more computing power per dollar with a Macintosh. I'm on my third Mac now, and was even contemplating buying my fourth--all thanks to Bill Gates and Microsoft Windows. The latest competitive triumph has come, ironically, in a field in which the arrogant monopolist still has what Democrats, with their complete misunderstanding of markets, would call a monopoly. Netscape still sells 60% of the web browsers on the market. It used to sell a much larger share of the browsers, but it acted like an arrogant monopolist, allowing Microsoft to offer its Internet Explorer to millions of consumers. Netscape is still the "monopoly," but it is losing its market share to Microsoft quickly. That's why Netscape has run screaming to the federal government seeking protection against the choices of its customers--and former customers--in favor of Explorer. Anti-trust law, ironically, has always been used by non-competitive big businesses to try to thwart efforts of competitors to offer consumers better goods at lower prices. Under the Supreme Court's "rule of reason"--the rationale the "progressive" Court developed decades ago in intepreting federal anti-trust law--you're considered a "monopoly" to be busted if your competitors complain about you. So if you compete with the other big companies, they complain, and the federal government busts you. But if you act like a monopolist to keep prices high and quality low, competitors don't complain and the government leaves you alone. Microsoft has advanced by offering competitive products at competitive prices. Democrats and federal bureaucrats advance their careeers by offering invented crises to justify government control of your life, which they hide behind the rhetoric of "being for the people." But we the people have spoken--by buying Microsoft products. We've also spoken, and continue to speak, by buying lots of products from Microsoft's competitors as well. In the market, each consumer can get what he or she wants. Government, on the other hand, tries to impose one outcome--the one desired by Democrat control-freaks--on everyone. Below is a humorous and telling quotation from Ayn Rand about how government criminalizes economic activity through the use of anti-trust Big Government. Rand isn't may favorite thinker, but she has a thing or two to say about the evils of Big Government. Below the Rand quotation is a letter from Microsoft, urging you to join the petition against the Democrats' latest attempt to substitute Big Government diktat for our decisons in the market. I too urge you to go to the web site they list, and join the petition against Big Government! Sincerely, David B. Levenstam, CPA, MT, MA GrammNet back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Capitolhill/3390/ To subscribe to GrammNet, email me at AdmrlLocke@aol.com, with a message to the effect that you'd like to subscribe. ------------------------------------------- "Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal from the moment he goes into business, no matter what he does. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for intent to monopolize; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for "unfair competition" or "restraint of trade";