Re: keyboard/mouse programming


"Robert Redelmeier" <redelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:i%B3j.3570$fl7.318@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Rod Pemberton <do_not_have@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in part:
Looking at "Myths of Antitrust Progress"
by Prof. Dominick T. Armentano
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg20n2a.html

"Horizontal price agreements and resale price maintenance
are still illegal..."

And further down:

"And alleged 'barriers to entry' and 'raising rivals cost'
confuses genuine legal barriers, ..."

I take those to mean that RRC isn't illegal.

Quite the contrary. Armentano is a declared antitrust
law abolishionist. He deplores any expansion which RRC
reepresents.


Did he, a PHD, misrepresent the facts there? I'd think that legal
revisionism, while useful to convince legal outsiders like myself, would
immediately be noticed by legal insiders and therefore would've been
extremely brash and risky when attempting to develop respect with one's
peers... While I found that via a search, IIRC, it was on the CATO
institute site which is well respected, isn't it? Ah, it's libertarian -
they're against government intrusion into capitalism and into individuals
lives - seems good to me...

I'm far more cautious. RRC is extremely hard to prove.

"Hard to prove...," but, is it illegal by law or precedent. Or, is it just
a supportive argument for anticompetitive behavior defined by other laws and
precedents? If it is a well used area of law, I should be able to find much
on the general Internet and on Wikipedia. Perhaps it goes by
some other name more frequently...

What concerns me more is the redefinition of capitalism, at least for
dominant corporations, by anti-trust law and precedent to a subset of
capitalism defined, not by economists or exceptional capitalists, but by
legal scholars... This is scary. Experts at word games, not mathematics,
are attempting to define capitalism. They could very well define a
mathematically impossible situation. That'd be great for attorney fees
while it lasted. Economists understand that there are very few luxury
markets and some markets with mild pricing power due to branding. But,
essentially, most markets are comprised of substitute goods and have no
pricing power. I.e., all competitors engage implicit price collusion
because no single competitor can afford not to follow the pricing of the
other competitors, e.g., gas stations, butter, etc. So, from that
perspective, capitalism, defined as attempting to earn a profit on some
product or service, becomes the ability to reduce your costs to maximize
your profit spread or the ability to raise your competitors costs to
encourage them to raise overall market prices to maximize your profit
spread, i.e., RRC. If there is a 50/50 split (you/them) between the two and
RRC is declared to be illegal for all companies, half the lawful US economic
activity for substitutable goods was just outlawed...(bankruptcies,
rampages, riots, etc.). The concept of RRC can only be applied to those who
can afford to "take the abuse."

But if you could and could show it had the effect of
lessening competition (likely easy), then I'd expect a US
court to convict.

That still indicates to me that it's just a supportive argument from your
perspective.


Rod Pemberton

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