One of those requests was seemingly torn from the pages of Ayn Rand?s Atlas Shrugged. A DOJ lawyer asked that Apple be forced to ?implement a compliance program with training for executives and agree to an independent monitoring trustee.?
An ?independent monitoring trustee??you have to picture it. Think of a well-educated, highly-paid lawyer whose job is sit at the conference table with Apple executives and issue the modern equivalent of a Roman emperor?s thumbs up or thumbs down on every important strategy the company is considering. On what authority? On the court?s authority under America?s antitrust laws to regulate the day-to-day conduct of businessmen?in this case by appointing a mini-dictator whose arbitrary ?proposals? and ?recommendations? will be calculated to please his Washington friends. As a prominent antitrust attorney said recently: ?Any time there is a monitor, there is someone sticking their nose in your future business and you aren?t comfortable.?
In Rand?s novel, the particular law that necessitated a Washington-installed monitor was designed to control sales of a brand-new metal, demand for which far outstripped supply. The law mandated that each customer receive a ?fair share? of the popular metal. What?s a ?fair share?? The law didn?t say?and so a monitor (nicknamed the ?Wet Nurse?) was sent to the factory, to substitute his dictates for the owners? decisions. Here?s a passage from the novel:
Nobody had known how to determine what constituted a fair share of what amount. Then a bright young boy just out of college had been sent to him from Washington, as Deputy Director of Distribution. After many telephone conferences with the capital, the boy announced that customers would get five hundred tons of the Metal each, in the order of the dates of their applications. Nobody had argued against his figure. There was no way to form an argument; the figure could have been one pound or one million tons, with the same validity. The boy had established an office at the Rearden mills, where four girls took applications for shares of Rearden Metal. At the present rate of the mills? production, the applications extended well into the next century.
Apple executives would do well to pick up a copy of the novel?and read it. It has sobering lessons about what happens when unjust laws permit government agents to persecute companies for trying to make money through voluntary trade. If Apple is saddled with an in-house antitrust compliance officer, we can expect an end to the fearless innovation that has made Apple a high-tech legend.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/VoicesforReason/~3/gyxRfRdaeuU/
andy cohen andy cohen mozambique oosthuizen great expectations jake owen oosthuizen louis
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