NOTE: This is on topic.
Pat Hines
6. BILL OF WRONGS
by L. Neil Smith <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Special to TLE
Well, as the whole wide world knows by now, Bill Gates' Microsoft has
been officially found guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act.
That this is a completely meaningless judgement may not be quite as
obvious to a younger generation. When I was young, just entering the
freedom movement, there was a lot of talk -- and writing -- about the
Sherman Act, a body of blatantly unconstitutional pseudolaw many
times more voluminous, twisted, contradictory, and arcane than the
tax code.
Under its bizarre provisions -- administered by bureaucrats and
judges who don't have any more idea what it means than you and I do
-- corporations can be (and have been) convicted of having a monopoly
when their share is openly admitted to be only a small fraction of
the market. A corporation can be convicted of monopoly practices when
they're alone in a market because nobody offers them competition. And
that only scratches the surface of the insanities enshrined in this
law.
The reason for the insanity is that this law was never meant to be
enforced in any normal sense. It's almost certainly the law Ayn Rand
was thinking of when she had a villain in <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> say
that the real point of passing such a law is that it be
<i>impossible</i> to obey, so that that government and its allies can
"cash in on the guilt".
Others, revisionist historians and economists, point out that the
Sherman Act and other legislative absurdities like it were not passed
-- the way we were taught in high school and college -- by courageous
crusaders-in-the-public-interest, to curb the vile excesses of greedy
robber barons and Teddy Roosevelt's "malefactors of great wealth",
but by politicians bought and paid for by the malefactors themselves,
to make market entry and effective competition as difficult as
humanly possible.
Every one of us has a fundamental, unalienable individual, civil,
Constitutional, and human right to be unmolested. As the great Robert
LeFevre said, as owners of ourselves -- as self-proprietors -- we all
have a right not to be involved <i>involuntarily</i> in relationships
with other human beings. Basically, that's the only right there is.
Every other right we commonly recognize is just a corollary to this
one real right.
Unfortunately, we begin to get into a mess whenever we start to think
of these corollary rights as somehow separable or divisible from one
another. Everybody does it. To one degree or another, we've all
gotten accustomed to thinking of them as rights in and of themselves,
independent from any other rights or -- and this is the real
long-term historic tragedy -- from any theory of the origin of rights
that makes sense.
In part, this is an unavoidable consequence of a highly necessary
division of labor within the freedom movement. Nat Hentoff and Wendy
McElroy battle for free speech, Aaron Zelman and Larry Pratt battle
for the right to own and carry weapons, Tom Sowell and Walter
Williams battle to end the government's oppression of black people
disguised as "help", Susan Wells and George O'Brien battle to end
illegal property seizures, Vin Suprynowicz and I battle the raw,
evil, insane stupidity today that places human dignity and the Bill
of Rights in constant peril.
However it often happens that an individual fails, inexplicably, to
see that other people's rights are every bit as precious to them as
his are to him. Or he may violently disapprove of other people's free
exercise of their rights -- while hypocritically demanding respect
for rights of his own that stem from precisely the same philosophical
source.
Just a few years ago, Bill Gates bankrolled a referendum in his
homestate of Washington, aimed at imposing yet another set of stupid,
unconstitutional, Jim Crow-style laws on his gun-owning neighbors.
The vote was an historic and humiliating defeat for the victim
disarmament crowd, spurring the gun-grabbers' current move to
frivolous liability lawsuits. It's astonishing what autocrats the
bigmouthed "democrats" are invariably revealed to be, whenever their
schemes are thwarted by the Voice of the People they otherwise claim
to revere as the Voice of God.
Gates' troubles with the Waco Willie Administration and Jackboot
Janet Reno's Justice Department had only begun at that point, when TV
journalists and picture magazines were pretending to be aghast at the
seaside mansion he was building for his wife, and he'd begun throwing
obscene amounts of money at politically correct causes, desperately
trying to buy approval from a festering snakepit of parasitic vermin
who spawn and devour their own in an endless cycle of cannibalistic
depravity.
In reality, Gates was next on the liberal menu no matter who he
bribed.
I can't think of a better example of the indivisibility of rights.
The simple fact is that if Gates had upheld the rights of others --
instead of spending hundreds of thousands trying to take them away --
then even as the most hated man on the internet, he could have
counted on millions of individuals, honorably willing to place
principle above personality, to rush to his assistance. The same
forces that got Rosie O'Donnell fired and stopped the infamous "Know
Your Customer" bank spy scheme might have tipped the balance in
Gates' struggle against the state.
Even now, were Gates to publicly endorse the idea of <i>full</i> Bill
of Rights enforcement -- denouncing victim disarmament and offering
to make restitution to the gun owners he's helped to harrass -- his
situation could change dramatically as millions made their disgust
with the government's actions known. Especially in a future
Republican administration he seems to be placing his hopes on, the
case against his company would wither on the vine and blow away with
the winds of change.
Like him or not, the only figure in world history comparable to Bill
Gates is Henry Ford, an individual who was plenty unpopular in his
own time. Ford didn't invent the automobile, but he put America --
and humanity -- on wheels. Gates launched America -- and humanity --
into cyberspace. In both cases America -- and humanity -- will never
be the same, and they owe these unpleasant and unpopular figures a
debt that's only been partially repaid by the enormous wealth they
accumulated.
Gates should get together with the real civil rights leaders of the
21st century, with Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America, Aaron Zelman
of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and with a
handful of uncompromising others, including Vin Suprynowicz and yours
truly.
Forget the NRA. Talk is cheap -- especially coming from the likes of
Wayne LaPierre -- and they're still the "loyal opposition", shills
for the other side, until they prove otherwise by <i>deeds/i> rather
than words.
Gates should stop wasting money on those who'll only turn and bite
him in the assets. Let him endow GOA and JPFO to the tune of eight or
nine figures. Let him underwrite semiannual conferences to establish
once and for all that the right to be unmolested -- to do business
without being hijacked by the Sherman Act, and to freely exercise the
right to own and carry weapons -- are one and the same right, after
all.
Together we could change the course of history.
What do you say, Bill?
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