Thanks. Come back and read some more. Would love to have some more of your enlightening comments.

Anyway, back onto the topic of competition. You raise some great points, and I have no problem admitting I’m wrong if you prove me wrong. When I started this blog just months ago, I was much more of a neocon. Now I’d probably be called a anti-war pacifist by my former neocons, because I think we shouldn’t have bases all over the world.

You raise good points about technology coming out of government institutions. That is always a hard argument to dispute since many of our initial technologies come from the military, universities, NASA, etc. Assuming that this technology would only come about because of gov’t, assumes that the people who’s ideas they were would just not be innovative anymore without gov’t. It assumes the cost of developing these initial technologies are worth it, and it assumes that if that money was left in private hands, that same amount of money couldn’t create more and better technologies. That is assuming a lot, and it is ignoring the opportunity costs. What innovations were given up in pursuit of these gov’t dictates?

While you see Microsoft as an example of stiffling competition, I see it as proof that competition works. While you can stiffle it for a short period of time, it does not last unless you create a better or cheaper product or you use gov’t force. Mozilla and Google are eating them up a little at a time on the browser front. Apple beat them on the media front. Google is beating them online. I am reading article after article about Microsoft being clobbered because they have lost their innovative edge. Without gov’t, it is almost impossible to maintain a monopoly unless you deserve a monopoly. Will there be companies trying to corner a market? Yes, but you have that under gov’t where they can actually do it by the force of gov’t. Without gov’t they may achieve it, but it won’t last. While you talk about Microsoft’s practices, which were voluntary on both ends, I can show you case after case where large companies prevent small competitors from entering the market with gov’t regulation.

It may seem that I think all gov’t is bad, but I don’t. I believe our founders setup a good government with limited powers. The now is our government has become a government of the connected and bribed. It is not a gov’t of the people, and it is not looking out the the “general welfare”. They steer private and public money to their friends and sponsors. It is corrupt to its core, and it is costing us more than any private system ever would in both lost liberty and financial.

It’s interesting that you bring up technology, since many of the goodies we have exist despite, not because of, the entrepeneurial impulse. I’ll leave Apple aside since it’s a world unto itself and I haven’t used their products in many years – and I agree that The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) have been very innovative.

Mr. Gates and his associates, on the other hand, have certainly given us products that are no better than they have to be. Competition? Don’t say that word in Redmond – they’ll run you out of town!

So I’m looking at what I’m doing now – typing a comment on a weblog – and here’s what I see:

What we call The Internet started as a defense department research project called ARPANET in the late 60s. The early developers were university engineers working with government grant money. Would we have an internet today without ARPANET? Maybe, but there were no signs that any farsighted entrepeneurs saw an opportunity there.

Riding on the techniques pioneered by the ARPANET group, the foundations of the World Wide Web were developed by a research physicist named Tim Berners-Lee who worked at CERN, the supercollider facility in Europe. (We could have had one of those but Congress in its wisdom eliminated funding.)

And the first widely-used “browser” software designed to display HTTP files was a thing called Mosaic, developed by a student named Marc Andreesen at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications – a state school, you’ll notice. Mr. Andreesen would later found a company called Netscape and learn the perils of messing around in Microsoft’s market. Would we have browser software today without NCSA? There were no signs that any farsighted entrepeneurs saw an opportunity there until Andreesen made Netscape available – then Microsoft was all over it!

Currently, some of the most innovative software around is “open-source” – developed and maintained by people interested in such things and freely downloadable; LINUX is probably the best current alternative to Windows, and I use an open-source alternative to Photoshop called GIMP.

On the other hand… it has required the best efforts of antitrust enforcers on two continents to curb Microsoft’s practice of eliminating anything that might even look like competition. And I’ll note here that that is just what a profit-maximizing capitalist is supposed to do: eliminate the competition and achieve complete dominance in its market. You don’t maximize shareholder value by letting someone else sell to your customer base. Intel? Same thing – they don’t welcome competition either.

Moving from those specifics back to the basic debate… I don’t think private enterprise or the government are all good or all bad. Both are human institutions. It’s a mistake to conceive of “government” as some monolithic malign entity that exists solely to crush the entrepeneurial spirit, and it is also a mistake to see private enterprise as a bunch of greedy bastards out for nothing save their own self-aggrandizement.

In your original post you said, “If everyone had a gun, do you think people would be more polite, less inclined to be violent, and commit less crime?… Then again, if we can secure our liberties without government, there would be no need for government.”

That’s a big “if”. I’m a gun owner, I have enjoyed the shooting sports for over 40 years, I’ve fired exactly three rounds in self-defense in that time (all were warning shots), and I don’t think for a minute that I’d be safer without a police force. I’m with Thomas Hobbes on that – without government we don’t have a paradise where we all cooperate to build a better world. Without government, we have Somalia.

Also, you say businesses can always changes the terms of their agreements. If there is uninhibited competition, they will be punished for those actions. Their competitor would say, hey come to us, we have never changed a contract.

“One of life’s little lessons is that no one is any better than they have to be.” You might want to tell Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc that. I guess they are only being no better than they have to be.