A Glimpse of Reality by Thomas Sowell (Creators Syndicate): Competition means that there are winners and losers. When someone wins big, that is not a sign that the competitive process did not exist or had something wrong with it. Too many judges see the anti-trust laws as protecting competitors, instead of protecting competition as a process.The rhetorical device of using sales percentages as indicators of “control” of a market confuses end results with the process that led up to those results.... You cannot meaningfully define a market according to the physical or technological characteristics of a product. Computers can be substituted for typewriters, just as Linux can be substituted for Windows. In Spain, when a high-speed train began to run between Madrid and Seville, the division of passenger traffic between rail and air travel went from 33 percent rail and 67 percent air to 82 percent rail and 18 percent air. Trains are not a perfect substitute for planes at all distances, nor is Linux a perfect substitute for Windows in all uses. But to totally exclude it from the definition of the market that Microsoft “controls” is all too typical of the unreality of anti-trust “law.”
Sowell Sounding Very Austrian
