At 9:22 AM -0500 11/11/98, Albert P. Franco, II wrote:
You obviously think that anything goes in business. Frankly Gates is a perfect example of why you anarcho-BS is doomed to failure. He will do anything (and has) he can to be the only player in every market he touches.
And despite this, and his having large numbers of lawyers on his side, and despite having large quantities of cash to persue advertising, LINUX IS KICKING HIS ASS IN THE SERVER MARKET, and poised to do the same on the desktop. Linux had little corporate funding (some Government thru it's subsidies of colleges and the internet), almost no advertising, and no, or negative mindshare until recently.
He has destroyed otherwise perfectly good businesses and products just to increase his profits. He has violated workers rights to increase his profit. In short he has demonstrated that if you let him murder wouldn't be to far a step to reach his goals.
Ah, but if we let HIM, then we'd have that shot as well.
He is the monster that proves that your ideas are actually very very old
He is not a monster, he is just doing what many other businessmen have done down thru the years.
And so everybody's so busy shooting each other that nobody is investing, and I have to ask, "What happened to the capitalism part of anarcho-capitalism?"
You assume that people will always be shooting. Most will figure out that guns really aren't an economical solution to most problems. Remember the "Bad, Bad" wild west? Well, it seems that despite what the movies tell you, you are more likely to get shot today in parts of Chicago or LA than in most of the Old West. Why? Guns really don't pay as a wealth _getter_, only as a wealth keeper.
War is simply not good economics, and anarchy is war--constant, festering, sometimes small scale, sometimes large scale, but always war.
By that comparison, so is life. -- "To sum up: The entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance. It is a product: (a) of a gross misinterpretation of history, and (b) of rather naïve, and certainly unrealistic, economic theories." Alan Greenspan, "Anti-trust" http://www.ecosystems.net/mgering/antitrust.html Petro::E-Commerce Adminstrator::Playboy Ent. Inc.::petro@playboy.com