[CLUE-Talk] Legal breaking of the MS monopoly WAS: Re:[CLUE-Tech] HP laptop

[Kevin Cullis]

Sean LeBlanc wrote:
> 
> The only real anti-competitive practice (on an OS level) I can think of that
> affects everyone is the WinModem and WinPrinter, but with proper
> understanding those can be avoided, and with enough people avoiding those
> faulty products, there will be a correction as well. I realize hardware
> vendors do this so they can cut costs on these components, but they need to
> be clearer about this.

Just because you can't think of anything, doesn't mean that it's not
going on and you may not have heard if it came by, but I, too, believe
in Libertarian philosophy (even got Ludwig von Mises books to show) to a
point.  The point with Libertarianians is that they believe EVERYONE is
good and ALL government is bad whereas the other end of the spectrum is
the everyone is NOT so good, including businesses but government is
good. Truth is, it's a little of both. Enron is a perfect example on the
business side, Communism is on the other.
 
> I guess as a Libertarian, I fear that any class action suits being taken (at
> least on behalf of a federal or state government) against a company amount
> to little more than extortion in the end, and benefit no one but big
> government. Take the tobacco settlement. The biggest in history: 200+
> BILLION. And it turns out that years later, MOST states are spending that
> money any way BUT towards the original intent of "preventing smoking"...some
> are using the money to balance their budgets.  What will be the final result
> of an M$ settlement? A Software Department to "oversee" the industry? That
> could be disastrous.

The class action suits are not the problem, but the "what do we do after
we win" sort of answers and the result that are looked for. Let me give
you an example.  Not too soon after 9/11 I was watching CSPAN and they
had a briefing regarding the damage the plane that hit the Pentagon had
done.  Long story short, the original contract was written to spec and
amounted to 2500 (or 3500, I forgot) pages long of spec sheets they
wanted in improving the Pentagon.  Rather than a spec-based contract,
they rewrote it to a performance-based contact which got it down to less
than 20 pages.  Result: the 9/11 plane had a direct hit on the newly
completed section of the Pentagon and they were calculating that if the
plane had hit an older section that the damage and death toll would have
been MUCH higher. They had pictures of the windows of the new section
compared with the older section a few hundred yards away: the new
windows just a few yards were NOT blown out and the older windows a few
HUNDRED yards away WERE blown out.

Needless to say, I'm all for performance based results and both
government AND business have done bad as well as good, but I do prefer
smaller governments.  Did you know that out of 133,000 companies in
Colorado, only 269 have greater than 500 employees! (2500 have 100-500
employees, 17,000 have 20-99, and 114,000 have less than 20 employees) 
The state of Colorado has, I hope I'm not mistaken, about 30,000
employees. Do you see a problem with these numbers?

Man can do evil or good either in business or in government and we need
both, now it becomes a matter of how much of each.

Kevin