Robert Bork: Supreme Court Nomination Hearings from PBS NewsHour and EMK Institute
17 Jan 2019 Leave a comment
in law and economics, politics - USA Tags: Robert Bork
Robert Bork: Perspectives on Judicial Activism
22 Dec 2018 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, law and economics, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: constitutional law, Robert Bork
Robert Bork: Supreme Court Nomination Hearings
14 Jul 2018 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, law and economics, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice Tags: constitutional law, Robert Bork
Robert Bork, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the radicalism of the original intent of equal protection before the law (via George Will)
12 Jul 2018 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, discrimination, economics of education, law and economics, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: constitutional law, racial discrimination, Robert Bork
Frank Easterbrook: Discussion of Robert Bork’s “Saving Justice” from Nixon
26 Dec 2016 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, economic history, labour economics, politics - USA Tags: economics of constitutional law, Frank Easterbrook, Richard Nixon, Robert Bork, Watergate scandal
Thomas Sowell – Robert Bork Hearings (1987)
07 Oct 2016 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, economic history, economics, labour economics, law and economics Tags: affirmative action, racial discrimination, Robert Bork, Thomas Sowell
F.A. Hayek and Robert Bork on Law, Legislation and Liberty
13 Jun 2016 Leave a comment
in Austrian economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics, F.A. Hayek Tags: Robert Bork
Speaking of natural monopolies and predatory entry – Netscape is 20 years old today!
15 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, law and economics Tags: browser wars, law and economics, Microsoft anti-trust trial, Richard McKenzie, Robert Bork, scourge of lower prices, William Shugart
You show your age when you remember that people used to pay $49 to download the Netscape Navigator browser.
Yes,people used to pay for browsers until nasty Microsoft came along in act of predatory entry started giving its Internet browser away from free in the hope of monopolising the market once Netscape went out of business when it would jack its price up again to recoup the intervening losses.
After the first browser war, the usage share of Netscape had fallen from over 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent by the end of 2006.
During the 1990s, Microsoft competitors — Netscape, IBM, Sun Microsystems, WordPerfect, Oracle, and others —pressed the Justice Department to sue Microsoft for tying Internet Explorer to Windows even though only one of them, Netscape, had a browser.
The demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft’s antitrust trial, where the Court ruled that Microsoft’s bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic and illegal business practice.
After losing on appeal , the Department of Justice announced in September 2001 that it was no longer seek to break up Microsoft and would instead seek a lesser antitrust penalty. Microsoft decided to draft a settlement proposal allowing PC manufacturers to adopt non-Microsoft software.
As William Shughart and Richard McKenzie observed:
Microsoft’s critics have advanced a number of economic theories to explain why the firm’s behaviour has violated the antitrust laws.
None of those critics has articulated why or how consumers have been harmed in the process.
Instead, the furious attacks on Microsoft have focused on the injuries supposedly suffered by rivals (on account of Microsoft’s pricing and product-development strategies) and by computer manufacturers and Internet service providers (on account of Microsoft’s “exclusionary contracts”).
Before former Judge Robert Bork became a lobbyist for Microsoft’s rivals, he said in The Antitrust Paradox:
Modern antitrust has so decayed that the policy is no longer intellectually respectable.
Some of it is not respectable as law; more of it is not respectable as economics; and … because it pretends to one objective while frequently accomplishing its opposite … a great deal of antitrust is not even respectable as politics.
A simple rule for a complex world: the moment that evidence is tended to a court about what happened to the competitors in a lawsuit under competition law, that court must dismiss the suit out of hand.
Too many lawsuits under competition law are designed to protect the consumer from the scourge of lower prices!
The best proof that a merger or other business practice is pro-consumer is the rival firms in that market are against it. Why would a firm be against a merger or other business practice that raises the prices of their business rivals?
HT: HistoricalPics
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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