Comment by jaymzcampbell

> And before someone says that "free market is always good and government is bad"

I've never really understood that dichotomy myself. The free market IS good, that is for sure. But it won't exist unless the gov't uses its power to create it. Companies have to be kept small enough that there will always be a bunch of choices. And that won't happen by itself.

The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.

We simply need meaningful penalties that involve jail time and % fines, on top of the ill gotten gains. The current model is steal $1 million, get fined $250k, enjoy the profits.

Sadly, that'll never happen, because CU made bribery legal and who's congress going to listen to? The 100s of millions they allegedly govern or the guy that handed them $25k for a kitchen remodel.

Spoiler: It's not the citizens.

> the optimum free market strategy if there is no government is to hire hitmen to assassinate the executives of competidor companies

There's a huge difference between opposing regulation and permitting murder. Equating the two is a strawman, given that there are a large number of people who oppose various regulations and very few who would want to legalize murder.

As far as I understand the conditions of a free market are not met in this case:

According to the english Wikipedia: * A capitalist free-market economy is an economic system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand [...]

Here one can argue that the available services (i.e. maintaining a train) are not set freely by the forces of supply and demand, but by the constructor of the train; at least to some extend.

You said that "[a] real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies". I partially agree in this case. A free market that contains competitors that are able to fully satiate it will always require a government that hinders it from working towards a controlled market. By a controlled market I mean monopoles, oligopoles, cartels, or otherwise controlled environments(1). So if there's no competitor I can walk to in case I am unhappy with my trading partner the market isn't free by definition. I can hardly think of bakeries in town requiring governmental intervention (unless they form a cartel, that is).

Not every market should be free, however. I guess you've just met too many hard-liners arguing for shady business practices in the name of the free market. I'd argue that a shady business will cease to exist in a free market due to the customers running away.

PS: Funny enough, I am fully onboard with stronger anti-trust enforcement (legislation only if that proves to be insufficient), only that I am doing it as a proponent to regain market freedom.

(1) Intentionally left broad as I can't be bothered to come up with a definition that fits what I have in mind.

Funny that your optimum free market strategy is murder. A market where murder is a legitimate strategy is anything but free. In fact a good litmus test as to the freedom of a market (or any social structure) is the legitimacy of murder.

Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.

This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.

Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.

> We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement. It is absolutely ridiculous to allow companies to behave this way.

You think? I have been wondering the same thing myself for years and i'm still flabbergasted that people don't treat this stuff more seriously.

No one literally says that.

> "free market is always good and government is bad"

This view seems especially American, but it is also a very liberal view (in the philosophical sense, not the somewhat weird partisan sense). Liberalism reconceives the common good, private property, and freedom dramatically. Whereas traditionally, the state is viewed as steward of the common good (that is its essential function), and private property as something instituted for the sake of the common good, liberalism conceives of private property as primary and the common good as something grudgingly ceded from the private good. Freedom is traditionally understood as the ability to do what one ought (the freedom to be what you are by nature, that is, a human being), but liberalism construes it as the ability to do whatever you please. (It's an odd idea. If I happen to want to gouge my eyes out and cut my arms off for no reason, doing so does not make me free. It makes me less free, because now I am less capable of functioning fully as a human being. I am confined and prevented from doing all sorts of good things. Human nature is the yardstick by which freedom is measured.)

What does this all mean? Well, it means government becomes construed as an artificial, even malicious construct that stands in the way of freedom. Certainly corruption exists, but this is not a valid argument against government as such. And besides, without government, something fills the vacuum. The absence of authority isn't freedom, but exposure to power that lacks authority.

So, yeah, free markets are good, as long as freedom (and thus the good) is construed in the traditional, not the liberal sense. That means that government, properly understood, is not an obstacle to free markets, but a sine qua non of truly free markets.

> We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement

The Microsoft disaster you are replying to could just as easily be blamed on the government in the first place. Why were they so slow to react? Why couldn't the FTC have seen that, or been alerted and acted immediately? There is no legitimate reason, other than the government is a socialist organization that has no incentive to actually get anything done. This is why USPS, VA, Amtrak, etc all suck. Throwing more government at the problem will have the opposite effect: less will get done!

> You can’t exactly stop someone from putting an open source OS on their hardware

Of course you can. Have secure boot requiring a signed bootloader. Currently Microsoft are good enough to sign a linux bootloader so you can run things like ubuntu.

Doesn't mean that in 73 years you'll have a situation where OSS is not only illegal, but you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

> You can’t exactly stop someone from putting an open source OS on their hardware [...]

Of course you can. It's a train, not a PC. Its primary function is to *safely* get me from point A to point B. No safety certification for the whole thing (including software), means it doesn't go on tracks. The freedom of your fist ends where my nose begins, which means your freedom to mess up the train's software ends where I step on board.

Poland has had its share of railroad catastrophes, and I very narrowly avoided being a victim - I got late for this train: <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17248735>. I no longer live there - I like trains, but the trains in Poland are an unmitigated disaster every single time I visit.

> [...] and if the train software was open-source, then this “clawback code” nonsense would have been impossible to keep secret.

There's two problems with that:

1. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean you get to load your own modified version (see above); which means the software that's actually running on the train can trivially be made different from the sources you were delivered;

2. Just because it's open source, doesn't mean it can't have a hardware backdoor, or some sort of manufacturer-installed APT.

You can't even buy an Intel CPU that doesn't include an entire separate core, with its own Ethernet controller and OS - and that is the stuff that's actually documented and sold as an "enterprise" feature. Imagine an entire train of nooks and crannies to hide this sort of nonsense.

Google has agreements with TV manufacturers that provent it.

https://www.techspot.com/news/84374-google-android-license-r...

OS/2 Warp is still used today, albeit in very limited situations.

I managed IT at hospitals for a large part of my career. At one of them, they had a "Lanier transcription cluster". It was 6 systems. One of them was an OS/2 Warp install that managed the modem cards.

It's apparently used to manage hardware, like those modem cards. Evidently, it does a great job of it.

I agree with you though. I think that Open Source would have made it much more of a competitor to Windows, today.

Then again, throw enough resources at anything and it could contend...ok.. not TempleOS, but everything else. ;)

Now we just need a a good open source OS made for lifelong windows/macOS users. Not one made for lifelong linux users.

You make some fair points. My main point is this:

Stop posting the AARD code thing as some kind of "gotcha!". AARD is irrelevant. If you want to point at anti-competitive or problematic things Microsoft did then point at things that actually mattered.

> William Gates was The World's Richest Man for what, twenty years without fail?

Longer.

For some reason, when he endowed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, its assets stopped being counted as part of his wealth, despite being completely controlled by him.