Références
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Chasse aux Sorcières Contre Microsoft
En 2000, l'Union européenne proclamait vouloir devenir « l'économie de la connaissance » la plus performante du monde. Huit ans plus tard, il ne reste rien ou presque de ce rêve, et ce pour une raison précise : plutôt que de déréglementer, de déréguler, de créer de l'ouverture et de l'initiative, l'Union a continué à ajouter des réglementations aux régulations. Ou bien, dans les années qui viennent, l'Union européenne changera et se donnera les moyens de s'adapter au fonctionnement planétaire qui vient, ou bien elle continuera sur la voie actuelle, et deviendra toujours davantage une zone en déclin. Les poursuites menées par la Commission européenne contre Microsoft, les abus de droits commis dans le cadre de ces poursuites, les graves erreurs de raisonnement économique qui ont sous-tendu ces abus de droit sont exemplaires de ce qu'il ne faut pas faire et du pouvoir pris par une bureaucratie qui nous menace tous, que nous soyons consommateurs ou entrepreneurs.
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Competition and Entrepreneurship
Stressing verbal logic rather than mathematics, Israel M. Kirzner provides at once a thorough critique of contemporary price theory, an essay on the theory of entrepreneurship, and an essay on the theory of competition. Competition and Entrepreneurship offers a new appraisal of quality competition, of selling effort, and of the fundamental weaknesses of contemporary welfare economics.
Kirzner's book establishes a theory of the market and the price system which differs from orthodox price theory. He sees orthodox price theory as explaining the configuration of prices and quantities that satisfied the conditions for equilibrium. Mr. Kirzner argues that "it is more useful to look to price theory to help understand how the decisions of individual participants in the market interact to generate the market forces which compel changes in prices, outputs, and methods of production and in the allocation of resources."
Although Competition and Entrepreneurship is primarily concerned with the operation of the market economy, Kirzner's insights can be applied to crucial aspects of centrally planned economic systems as well. In the analysis of these processes, Kirzner clearly shows that the rediscovery of the entrepreneur must emerge as a step of major importance.
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Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure
The stated purpose of antitrust laws is to protect competition and the public interest. But do such laws actually restrict the competitive process, harming consumers and serving the special interests of a few politically-connected competitors? Is antitrust law a necessary defence against the predatory business practices of wealthy, entrenched corporations that dominate a market? Or does antitrust law actually work to restrain and restrict the competitive process, injuring the public it is supposed to protect? In this breakthrough study, professor Armentano thoroughly researches the classic cases in antitrust law and demonstrates a surprising gap between the stated aims of antitrust law and what it actually accomplishes in the real world. Instead of protecting competition, professor Armentano finds, antitrust law actually protects certain politically-favoured competitors. This is an essential work for anyone wishing to understand the limitations and problems of contemporary antitrust actions.
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The Antitrust Religion
Many successful American businesses have been accused of anti-competitive practices. Drawing on 50 years of experience with U.S. antitrust laws, attorney and author Edwin S. Rockefeller sheds light on why lawmakers, bureaucrats, academics, and journalists use arbitrary and irrational laws and enforcement mechanisms to punish capitalists rather than promote competition. The Antitrust Religion argues that everything most people know about antitrust is wrong.
The orthodox view is that antitrust was created to protect competition. But Rockefeller's account is strikingly different. He argues that antitrust in practice has often benefited, not the public, but specific businesses that wanted to take down their competitors. In cases ranging from early antitrust targets like Standard Oil to the more recent IBM and Microsoft cases, he reveals why some companies are punished for being winners in the market.
Rockefeller vividly shows how antitrust has been transformed into a quasi-religious faith. He explains that this “antitrust religion” relies on economic theories that bestow a veneer of objectivity and credibility on law enforcement practices that actually rely on hunch and whim. On issues such as mergers and price fixing, Rockefeller thoroughly examines arbitrary antitrust laws that lead to ill-informed juries and bureaucratic abuse. He concludes that those laws also create a perverse incentive for entrepreneurs to hold down sales volume and avoid improvements in price, quality, and service. Otherwise, such entrepreneurs could become the next targets of the antitrust priests.
The Antitrust Religion will greatly assist business professionals, journalists, policymakers, professors, judges, and all others interested in government regulation of business in understanding how our antitrust laws actually work.
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Competition Laws in Conflict: Antitrust Jurisdiction in the Global Economy
The growth and integration of national and global markets should make the world more competitive and antitrust policy less important. Instead, globalization has produced a veritable antitrust proliferation. When corporate transactions routinely cross borders, anti-competitive practices in one jurisdiction invariably affect producers and consumers in another. A system in which each affected jurisdiction gets to apply its own competition rules to those transactions poses a danger of grave political conflicts and, moreover, intolerable costs for producers, who must comply with the often conflicting demands of multiple jurisdictions. Moreover, states have powerful incentives to permit domestic industries to exploit outsiders, or even to facilitate such practices. High-profile antitrust conflicts, from the prosecution of Microsoft in state, national, and international forums to the transatlantic disagreement over the European Union's merger policy, illustrate the difficulties. Possible solutions to these problems range from improved intergovernmental cooperation, to direct policy harmonization, to a new regime of "structured competition" in antitrust policy modeled on U.S. corporation law.
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The Abolition of Antitrust
"The Abolition of Antitrust" asserts that antitrust laws - on economic, legal, and moral grounds - are bad, and provides convincing evidence supporting arguments for their total abolition. Every year, new antitrust prosecutions arise in the US courts. Gary Hull and the contributing authors look at some of these cases - as well as the very Antitrust Act itself - and conclude that they are based on an erroneous interpretation of the history of American business, premised on bad economics. For Hull, antitrust prosecutions are based on a horrible moral inversion: that it is acceptable to sacrifice America's best producers. The contributors explain how key antitrust ideas, for instance, "monopoly," "restraint of trade," and "anticompetitive behavior," have been used to justify prosecution, and then make clear why those ideas are false. They sketch the historical, legal, economic, and moral reasoning that gave rise to the passage and growth of antitrust legislation. This dynamic and accessible work, now available in paperback, is not simply a polemical argument for a particular policy position.
On publication, Adam Mossof at Michigan State University commented, "The essays in this book present a sustained economic, historical, moral, and legal broadside against the various federal statutes known as antitrust doctrine. They explode the cherished myths underlying the antitrust laws, and expose their intellectual fountainhead in a morality of self-sacrifice that is incompatible with individual rights, free enterprise, and objective law. With the publication of this text, businessmen, lawyers, economists, policymakers, legislators, and judges finally have access to a systemic critique of the antitrust laws. From here on, if antitrust continues to violate the rights of businessmen and to ravage the American economy, it is not for lack of knowing how and why."