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Politicians Sow the Seeds of America's Economic Collapse.(the governments role in the Microsoft antitrust case)(Brief Article)
Insight on the News, Dec 27, 1999, by Thomas Sowell
When a writer from the New York Times was doing a story on Microsoft a few years ago, he asked their top management about the size of their lobbying office in Washington -- and learned that they had no Washington office. But Microsoft's rivals in Silicon Valley not only had been lobbying, they had been contributing big bucks to the Democrats and providing President Clinton with an audience of cheering executives during his visits to California.
Is the Clinton Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft a payoff to those who paid political tribute -- and retribution against a company that didn't? Things seldom are done that crudely or that openly in Washington. But an administration that sent dangerous technology to China, after getting illegal campaign contributions from the Chinese military, should not be assumed to be above that.
Zealots for campaign-finance reform tend to see political contributions from business interests solely as bribes to get government favors. It never seems to occur to them that it also could be protection money. Governments operating protection rackets are nothing new in history and there are gross examples around the world today. Why, then, is this never considered as a possible reason for many large campaign contributions from the corporate world? Perhaps it is nothing more than the antibusiness bias of the liberal media.
But whatever the reason, the campaign-finance reform issue is rife with hypocrisy. People who talk about the "root causes" of crime have no interest in the root causes of big bucks campaign contributions. Whatever special political favors are gotten by this or that particular business or industry, there is no question that business as a whole is increasingly hemmed in by government regulations, mandates and pressures. In short, business as a whole has been losing its ability to mind its own business and increasingly has become a plaything for bureaucrats and politicians. Is this what you would expect if corporate campaign contributions were just buying favors? Or is it more consistent with paying greater amounts of protection money, as there have been greater numbers of government powers to be protected against?
Incidentally, Microsoft belatedly has entered the political arena. There even are complaints that its influence is behind congressional reluctance to appropriate the kind of money desired by the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Ironically, what arouses the ire of the Times writer is that Microsoft did not have a Washington office before. That was "arrogance" on Microsoft's part, if you believe the voice of the liberal vision. When not bending the knee to politicians and not paying for protection are considered to be "arrogance" then you know that you are in the wonderland of political punditry.
Quaint as it may be deemed these days to refer to history, the tragic fact is that many nations and many eras have been corrupted, and their economic development retarded, by precisely the kind of relationship between government and business that we have been moving toward. Put differently, American prosperity and free enterprise both are highly unusual in the world, and we should not overlook the possibility that the two are connected. Where those who hold political power treat businesses as prey rather than national assets to be safeguarded, the biggest losers are the public, whose standard of living never reaches the level of prosperity made possible by existing resources and technology.
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