KatieSchenk.com

Maybe it’s because I’m from Arkansas, but I was a little confused on this and the chicken analogy helped quite a bit. Yes. I am serious. Kind of. All of this big guy/little guy talk reminds me of Wal*Mart (yes it’s a star, not a dash).

squashed:

Since Jakob asked, I’ll explain why antitrust laws are both a legitimate and moral government function.

The general idea of capitalism is that value is created when people make exchanges.  If I sell my chicken for $10 I wanted $10 more than a chicken, and somebody else wanted a chicken more than $10.  If both Jakob and I are trying to sell chickens, whomever is willing to sell for less will make the sale.  Everybody wins, except whoever doesn’t sell his chicken, who is where he started.  At least, everybody wins if nobody does something…unsavory.

There are a few unethical things I could do to screw up Jakob’s sale and get a better price for my chicken.  I could hire a thug to beat up Jakob.  I could lie and say that Jakob’s chicken has a contagious bird flu.  I could throw spurs on one of my chickens, have it peck Jakob’s only chicken to death, and then sell the customer one of my other chickens for three times what Jakob would have sold for.  That last one is sort of what the big newspaper tried to do.

Generally speaking, you’re allowed to do whatevery you want with your property.  There is nothing wrong with competing and winning, but there is something wrong with deliberatly stopping somebody else from competing.  The problem wasn’t that the newspaper sold cheap ads, the problem was that the big newspaper deliberately took a loss on ads (which is a newspaper’s primary revenue source) for one of its papers specifically to destroy the competition. You are permitted to improve your business by enhancing the value you offer others, but not by deliberately destroying what somebody else offers for the purpose of eliminating competition.  In other words, I can go after your customers, but I can’t go after you.  That isn’t competition—it’s just pure friction.  In other words, waste.  The court, in this case, is not subsidizing the little paper, it’s telling the big paper to pay the little paper for the damage it illegally (and immorally) caused the paper.  The newspaper is not at the whim of the judge—but the judge (and jury in this case) enforces the law.  The law is just and necessary for a free market and fair competition.

The idea that limited anti-trust laws allows any and all government intervention is rubbish.The government is allowed to intervene in business when businesses take actions for the sole purpose of hurting others.