Dom Armentano contributes this great letter to today’s Wall Street Journal:
Your editorial is correct to condemn the Federal Trade Commission’s attack on Intel (“The 100 Years Chip War,” Dec. 18), but it is dead wrong to conclude that the government’s antitrust intervention is “unprecedented” or that antitrust laws really “exist to promote business and price competition.”
Have we forgotten the FTC’s eight-year (1958-1966) campaign against the Borden Co. to stamp out lower prices for evaporated milk? Or its 10-year (1957-1967) legal assault to end the Procter & Gample-Clorox merger in which the FTC’s primary argument against the consolidation was that the probable “economies and efficiencies” of the merger could be passed along to consumers?
Or how about the Justice Department’s 15-year (1953-1968) war against United Shoe Machinery in which United was ultimately ordered to create a competitor with divested shoe machinery assets, license out all of its own patents to the competitor, and then refrain from active competition with the new-born company for five years?
And have we already forgotten that the Microsoft antitrust debacle started with a two-year investigation by the FTC back in 1990 or that the Justice Department pursued the company for another 10 years because Microsoft bundled its Web browser, Explorer, with its Windows operating system, much to the delight of willing buyers. Recall that in the 1999 trial verdict, lower court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson even ordered the company divested until the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals unceremoniously discarded that absurdity in 2001. In short, the FTC’s assault on Intel is hardly unprecedented.
What these cases (and hundreds of others) establish beyond any reasonable doubt is that antitrust does not exist to promote business and price competition. Never has, never will. The theoretical and case evidence, some of which I’ve cited, is all the other way.
The real mystery surrounding antitrust is why knowledgeable observers of the free-market process persist in believing this fairy tale.
Dominick T. Armentano
Vero Beach, Fla.
