To: Charles Hughes who wrote (21784 ) 11/26/1998 12:23:00 AM From: Gerald R. Lampton Read Replies (1) | Respond to
Sorry, Chaz, to hear you are not willing to at least read Bork's book before you reject his ideas out of hand. All those people in the antitrust bar, on the bench, and elsewhere who say it is one of the most important and well-reasoned books ever written about antitrust -- I guess they're just a bunch of intellectual light-weights and corporate lackeys.What competition? There's a monopoly in place, right? I might argue that the process needs to start sooner, be more aggressive, and take less time in court. Perhaps via an in-place regulatory body rather than the relatively ineffective court system, because usually from here on we will be dealing with fast moving technological fields where the damage is done before you can get the law moving. any regulator or planner to know all the details about a particular industry that he or she needs to know to come up with a viable plan or set of regulations, particularly given the time constraints imposed by accelerating changes in technology. Furthermore, such pervasive intervention and regulation will lead to serious instability in the legal system and will eventually lead to a breakdown in the rule of law itself.I believe the ideas of natural monopoly and short term consumer price effects as the measure of harm are red herrings being injected into the antitrust debate from only one direction - those who want to wreck antitrust protections. To the extent that intelligent people entertain these concepts we lose time and much else.
