Playing Monopoly

June 8, 2000

Now that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson — described as “a pro-business, conservative Republican,” by the Wall Street Journal — has ordered the breakup of Microsoft, we should pause to reflect on antitrust measures and monopolies of power.

Years ago I was asked: “Why don’t you criticize Big Business the way you criticize Big Government?” A fair question. I answered that I wasn’t forced to deal with General Motors. I was free not to buy its products, and it couldn’t jail me for driving a Honda. By contrast, I had to pay the federal government roughly the price of a new car every year — and I never got the car. My money was distributed among others who were favored by the politicians.

Since then, Microsoft has replaced General Motors as the emblematic giant corporation. And I do deal with Microsoft. I use its products — freely and voluntarily, as everyone else does — and they have become indispensable to my work, even at this moment.

I don’t feel that I need Judge Jackson or Attorney General Janet Reno to “protect” me from Bill Gates. Neither of them could do what Gates has achieved. He is unique, a great innovator. They belong to the huge class of interchangeable people who run the government — that is, who deal with people through the constant threat of force, which is the essence of government. They can be replaced; countless others can do what they do.

Miss Reno, after all, was Bill Clinton’s third choice for her job. She will be remembered chiefly for violent confrontations in Waco and Miami, and perhaps secondarily for helping Clinton escape investigation by special prosecutors. People like her are essentially parasites; they produce nothing to enhance our lives. They are the people we really need to be protected from.

The definition of “monopoly” in business has become highly technical — and manipulable. But the bottom line is that I’m free to use the products of Microsoft’s competitors. I could even go back to my old Royal typewriter if necessary. But Gates attracts the predators as what Tom Wolfe has called “the Great White Defendant.” Jackson and Reno are basking in the glory of having nailed him.

Why is nobody talking about the real monopoly of power — that of the federal government? The word “federal” has become a misnomer; there is nothing really federal about a government that can claim authority over anything it chooses to control.

The Constitution is an antitrust act for government. It was designed to prevent the federal government from becoming a monopoly of power, or what the Framers called a “consolidated” government. A few specific powers were delegated to it, and all others were denied to it. The point of the Tenth Amendment is not, as is usually said, to protect “states’ rights,” but to limit federal powers.

But power tends to accumulate, and throughout the twentieth century the United States went the way of so many European nation-states. It abandoned its tradition of federalism and decentralized power, just as other countries were adopting communism, socialism, fascism, and other variants of the consolidated state. The interpretation of the Constitution was systematically and shamelessly warped to authorize what that Constitution clearly prohibits.

But who will break up the federal government’s monopoly? Most Americans, drenched in pro-government propaganda, are ignorant of the Constitution — especially if they’ve studied constitutional law in a pricey law school. We’ve fallen for the prevalent but preposterous notion that the interpretations of the U.S. Supreme Court somehow supersede the clear, original, traditional, and logically inescapable meanings of the text itself.

By inflating the meanings of a few phrases, some of which aren’t even in the Constitution — “interstate commerce,” “freedom of expression,” “equal protection of the laws” — the federal judiciary has helped create monopoly government.

A monopoly of the coercive powers of government — including the powers of taxing, regulating, arresting, and confiscating — is far more dangerous, and potentially lethal, than any powers a private corporation can amass. Bill Gates can’t arrest his competitors; he can’t lay armed siege to an eccentric religious sect; he can’t punish you for boycotting Microsoft. And he can’t distract attention from his troubles by bombing foreign countries.

Joseph Sobran

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