Jacob
You forget that when the Sherman Act was passed, the 16th Amendment(Income Tax) did not exist. The Federal Reserve did not exist. Standard Oil, the railroads, the steel industry and the other "robber barons" were not paying any income taxes on their profits. Plus, it made great copy for Charles Foster Kane's (er, William Randolph Hearst's) newspapers!
In short, the antitrust laws were passed during a era of rampant populism sentiment in Washington. They helped assuaged the feelings of people that the government was balancing out the equation between corporations and citizens* although the antitrust laws became toothless with the advent of government reform activism in the 1910-30's.
* BTW, "citizen" was what we used to call the "consumer".
Today, Microsoft does pay income taxes and operates under a net of regulations that that 1910-30's "era of reform" wove to circumscribe corporate practices like the Lilliputians did Gulliver.
Yet, the price of MSFT Office today is a fraction of what was paid for its INDIVIDUAL COMPONENTS in the 1980's, before it was a adjudged a monopoly by the hyenas in the DOJ.
So your apologium for the Herbert Spencer / Social Darwinism school of regulatory law is the defense of an anachronism. And, there is an overwhelming ongoing debate about the efficacy of the antitrust laws.
My favorite argument is that the law is arbitrary, subjective and tends to be enforced selectively, if at all. Sort of like state sodomy laws than are symbolic, arbitrary and not enforcable. Apt metaphor for this case,the sodomy laws, although you probably think that the consumer is getting raped while I believe it is MSFT and its shareholders who are being violated.
The fact that MSFT could achieve market dominance (I won't use the word monopoly) in such a "fettered" environment against such entrenched giants as IBM, DEC, XEROX, etc. is
truly amazing.
That is why this trial is a political witch hunt - that's all it can be. The antitrust laws are obsolete and the original need for them is now obviated by the tangled layers of microregulation the the "Mixed Economy" (to use that euphemism ) now imposes on business as well as the global effects of competition and the mad pace of technology.
But, the populist ""monopoly harangues" of the DOJ still catch a lot of dumb fish in its net.
Who benefits? Only the Democrats, who have used the politics of class warfare and envy at every juncture to divide us for their political ends.
Ciao,
Daniel
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