The following article is an adaptation of a lecture Mr. Salsman gave at Harvard University, in May of 1999. The print version has been edited lightly in order to retain it's spontaneous quality. Mr. Salsman has not reviewed the edited version. Just as Marxists do, the proponents of antitrust laws a century ago and today actively seek to obscure the crucial distinction between economic power and political power .
Big government is bad, but so is big business, they claim.
I don't use these war-like terms to exaggerate my point. Read any textbook on the great industrialists and financiers of history or any antitrust article from long ago or today and you'll see such terms tossed around as if there was no question that economic power is essentially equivalent to political or military power. No, they do not. And such terms are used in describing business activity precisely because the distinction between political power and economic power is being obscured. And it freely signed contracts with personal computers makers such as Dell and Compaq to include the browser, along with many other applications it had added to the Windows platform over the years, when the hardware box-makers installed Windows software.