*** Whining about MSFT monopoly *** Those who love to hate $ill Gates and the alleged MSFT monopoly, which is NOT a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word, should check out that bastion of free enterprise, the US Postal Service for true monopolistic power, waste and general uselessness. Here is Thomas Sowell [who I have yet to disagree with though I think I saw something I could get picky about a year or so ago].
qveauriche Message 16031567 and Clark Hare Message 16043135 [and probably other 4 July people in the midst of nationalistic rabid brain spasm] missed my point about governments [not just the USA] not complying with their own laws. Here is the USA government running a huge monopoly, the postal service, with legal force backing it up to prevent competition, breaking their own laws about antitrust and antimonopoly and anticompetitive. Which proves my point. Message 16031351
siliconinvestor.com
Do we hear whining from qdog? Where are the slavering anti-monopolists who attack $ill Gates.
How about the Californian government monopoly over electricity supplies, with pricing laws and other controls, which have resulted in huge losses in The New Paradigm state? Government monopoly power in California has caused blackouts. If you don't like the Blue Screen of Death from MSFT [not that I see it very often at all], you sure won't like the Black Screen of Death compliments of Governor Gray Davis [nor the elevators, air conditioning and lights not working].
QUALCOMM will spin off Spinco because they know that it will avoid corporate sclerosis. It will avoid antitrust attacks for a longer time. It will give more confidence to customers that they are not dealing with an all-powerful monster [IBM became a bit like that and too expensive at the mantra became instead of 'nobody got fired for buying IBM' 'only the unimaginative and incapable buy IBM' - well, that's what I saw anyway in my corporate life]. It makes attacks on QUALCOMM more difficult to mount - when all is in one bundle, an attack on one is an attack on all. So, if Leap, or NextWave, or Globalstar etc were all bundled into one, QUALCOMM would be forever fighting brush fires and being tainted by scandal, bankruptcy, hassles and confusion. Those companies can go away and fight like crazy without having to report back to a mothership for approval of Wacky ideas.
The USA also bleats on about free trade but restricts Kiwiland from selling sheep to the USA, despite that restriction being illegal as determined by WTO rules.
QUALCOMM will avoid anti-trust attacks with Spinco [for longer anyway - but BREW will get anti-trust people foaming at the mouth, with it being bundled into the overall Q! package, leveraging the CDMA monopoly]. Personally, I'm not anti-trust. I trust QUALCOMM and think others should too. They tried trusting Nokia, Ericy and the hagfish guild. Look where that got them = dressed up in umpty $$billion in spectrum with nowhere to go!
Mqurice
jewishworldreview.com
<THE U.S. Postal Service has raised its rates twice this year and is already talking about raising rates again next year. It has also made noises about eliminating Saturday mail deliveries. But the big problem with the Postal Service is not any of these particular policies. The big problem is that it is a monopoly and that the government keeps it a monopoly by law.
Why were people alarmed about the threatened elimination of Saturday mail deliveries? Would we panic if some supermarket said that it would close on Saturdays? No -- because we would just shop at some other supermarket. The Postal Service's problems are more serious because nobody else is allowed to deliver mail.
Nobody else is even allowed to put anything in your mailbox. Even though you bought the mailbox yourself, it is treated as if it is the property of the Postal Service. Moreover, the Postal Service can impose its own rules on possible rivals, such as Mailboxes, Etc. This is a monopoly plus.
The other side of the coin is that the Postal Service gets its monopoly and its various privileges -- including exemption from taxes, zoning laws, and vehicle license requirements -- at the cost of being subservient to Congress. By its own admission, the Postal Service has 26,000 post offices that are not making money. But closing them would bring on Congressional wrath. So would any attempt to seriously downsize its huge work force.
The net result is that the Postal Service is not only a rare privileged monopoly, it is an even rarer money-losing monopoly, due to such politically imposed inefficiencies. That is what is behind the constant rate increases and the threats to cut back service.
Although people who send first-class mail were exempted from the most recent rate increase, they are likely to be targets for the next one. But people who send first-class mail are not only already paying their own way, they are over-paying and subsidizing junk mail and other things that are not pulling their own weight economically.
People in a number of other countries have begun waking up to the fact that a government monopoly of mail deliveries is bad news for the public, both as people who send and receive mail and as people who pay the taxes to subsidize a losing operation.
New Zealand has allowed its postal service to close more than a third of its post offices and has started the process of privatization. Sweden, Finland, Australia and the Netherlands have also started the process of privatization.
By contrast, the U.S. Postal Service is not only keeping its subsidized monopoly, it is seeking to use its privileges to expand into other businesses. It has already been selling T-shirts, mugs, and other miscellaneous items, and making money from copiers in post offices.
What is wrong with that? What is wrong is that private businesses provide all these same goods and services -- and these businesses are subject to all the taxes, zoning laws, vehicle licensing fees and other legal requirements from which the Postal Service is exempt. Nor can private businesses borrow money on the basis of the government's credit, rather than their own earning power, as the Postal Service can. This is not simply unfair, it is uneconomic.
When the post office's copier takes business away from a local copy shop, it also takes taxes away from the local government. More important, the economy's resources do not flow to the most efficient user but to the operation with the most privileges.
One of the bases for the Postal Service's claims for its privileges is that it is bound by law to deliver mail everywhere in the country for the same price. That means that the guy who lives miles out in the middle of nowhere gets his mail deliveries subsidized by people who are mailing letters from New York to Chicago, which costs less than the price of a first-class stamp.
But that is trying to justify one privilege by another. Why should someone who lives in isolation have someone else pay the costs created by his isolation? If the isolation is worth it, then let the person who benefits pay for it. That goes not only for the cost of delivering the mail, but also for the cost of delivering electricity, water and other things that cost more to deliver to someone living out in a desert or up on a mountain top.
Monopoly means inefficiency and a money-losing monopoly means even more inefficiency. Make it a business like any other business and let others compete with it. > |
