I find it ironic that the Obama administration says that it is going to ramp up antitrust prosecutions of beleaguered American businesses. After all, it seems to me that Barack Obama is the de facto chairman of both Chrysler and General Motors simultanously, which surely would be a violation of antitrust law.
Gee, is Obama declaring himself to be above the law? Surely not!
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Free market capitalism, left to it’s own devices, is extremely anti-trust.
As long as a trust is being formed to ration offer and augment prices, other private interests will start their own venture to profit from the high prices generated by the trust.
Also, even the trustees themselves might be tempted to break away from the trust and start offering their products at lower prices or offering more of their products.
A trust is only possible when government regulation makes it prohibitively expensive and/or complicated to start a business, at this point the trust uses the government to prevent competition.
Now that Obama is head of GM and Chrysler, how many of you would bet that it would be impossible for a private company to start a new car company to compete against GM and Chrysler.
The US government would put sticks in the new car company’s wheels (pun intended).
“Gee, is Obama declaring himself to be above the law? ”
He makes the law, of course he is above the law.
Forgive my possible ignorance, but in this case, would it be possible to actually bring an anti-trust suit against the government?
Now that it has entered into the private sector in this way I would think that they should play by their own rules.
Of course the govt. would never agree to play by its own rules, that would be preposterous, but even to make a spectacle of it would at least wake people up to the absurdity of the situation. Both in terms of the govt.’s actual action and to their anti-trust laws.
We could literally use the govt. against itself if such a suit was filed.
Any thoughts?
Unfortunately, I’m afraid we can’t sue the government for anti-trust on this, just like we can’t break it up and form multiple competing “national security” firms or “civil dispute resolution” firms.
It would be hilarious, assuming you could get a judge to even hear the case. That would be the hard part-convincing a government employee that the government has outlawed itself.
And don’t forget that Obama is on the board of a dozens of banks and Wall Street firms. Rich Lowry has an article on the Obama monopoly: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/05/29/obama_incorporated_96732.html
Right on Thinker and Mark, we just need to find the right judge.
Of course it would almost definitely never happen, my dad is even a judge, a very conservative one at that and I doubt he would even take it seriously.
In any case it would be very entertaining to see someone try to at least make a spectacle of it. I’m sure it would wake up a lot of people to the nature of what’s going on in any case.
A fun exercise it would be…
Right on Thinker and Mark, we just need to find the right judge.
Of course it would almost definitely never happen, my dad is even a judge, a very conservative one at that and I doubt even he would take it seriously.
In any case it would be very entertaining to see someone try to at least make a spectacle of it. I’m sure it would wake up a lot of people to the nature of what’s going on in any case.
A fun exercise it would be…
“…very entertaining to see someone try to at least make a spectacle of it”
Obama’s Antitrust Trial is definitely worth at least a parody… call the Onion!
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