Gore: White House May Get Involved in MS Settlement Talks

Amigan writes " C|Net news.com is reporting on VP Al Gore's visit to Microsoft's campus today includes a statement from the Vice President that "...he expected that the White House would get involved in any settlement talks between the company and the Justice Department when antitrust remedies get discussed. Why would the White House need to be involved?"

Comments

Re:Signifying nothing - Unseen hand

[jsm2]

Without wanting to seem patronising, have you actually read Smith? To use "the invisible hand" as an argument against antitrust law is a pretty damn appalling mangling of "The Wealth of Nations". Smith was absolutely aware of what happens to consumers when powerful companies dominate a marketplace; the judge's argument about "inhibiting innovation" is clearly traceable to Smith.

A couple of quotes from The Wealth of Mations, showing what Smith actually thought about the Invisible Hand in this type of case:

"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

"The monopolists, by keeping the market continually understocked, by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. "

"In every country it always is and must be the interest of the great body of the people to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest. The proposition is so very manifest, that it seems ridiculous to take any pains to prove it; nor could it ever have been called in question, had not the interest sophistry of merchants and manufacturers confounded the common sense of mankind. "

You are entirely entitled to your views on Microsoft and the government, but please don't try to claim that Smith shared them (I would also suggest that in supporting Microsoft, you are not perhaps as consistent a libertarian as you think you are).

jsm

Govenment should enforce the law

[Zach Frey]

This is about power and it's obscene. I don't want Washington to decide how a private company might be split up. Is anyone stupid enough to think that this hasn't become a completely political action in the continual pattern of demonizing anyone who's worked hard and earned great wealth.

Boo hoo hoo -- let's all feel sorry for the poor oppressed billionaire, being persecuted by the Big Evil Gub'mint.

Bill's company is not in court for being sucessfull, but for breaking the law. Repeat that over and over until it sinks in -- "it's not about success, it's about crime." (Of course, anti-trust law is funny in that you have to be successful in order to have the means to break these laws -- but if Bill & Co. are so smart, and have so many lawyers on their payroll, you'd think they'd have heard of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act before now ...)

Say what you want about Billy Boy but he has done more for America (creating jobs, preeminence of the US in office automation and OS software market etc.) than any of those idiots in Washington put together.

I do not subscribe to the theory that "what's good for Bill Gates is good for America."

All of these points (net job creation, American business dominance) are ... arguable. There's certainly some folks at Netscape who would claim that Bill didn't help build jobs at their company ...

Regardless, we must come back to the basic point: Microsoft broke the law. The DOJ action is not an example of government out of control -- it is an example of the goverment doing its job to enforce the (democratically enacted) law.

Sheesh. Might as well feel sorry for those sucessful businessmen, the cocaine smugglers, when they tangle with government law enforcement. I suppose they ought to try using the defense that they are simply hard-working capitalist entrepeneurs, and that the goverment ought to leave private companies alone and not tell them how to run their business ...

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
-- G. K. Chesterton, "The Man Who Was Thursday"