“Last week, Federal District Judge Denise Cote ruled that Apple Inc. was guilty of collusion and of fixing the price of e-book,” Mark Hendrickson writes for Forbes. “The gist of the case is this: At the time Apple entered the e-book market, Amazon held a 90% share of the market and sold e-books for $9.99. After Apple entered the e-book market, Amazon’s market share fell, as did prices of e-books. If you are perplexed in trying to understand how Apple fell afoul of the antitrust brigades for lowering prices to consumers, the key point to grasp is that the federal government is not the friend and defender of the consumer, as popular mythology would have it.”
“The Apple case is not an aberration,” Hendrickson writes. “Uncle Sam has been a chronic thorn in the consumer’s side, intervening to raise consumer prices in a variety of ways.”
Hendrickson writes, “Punishing Apple for having lowered prices of a popular consumer item is typical of the perverse application of American antitrust law. Domenick T. Armentano’s classic study, Antitrust and Monopoly, details how, since its inception in 1894 with the Sherman Antitrust Act, antitrust law has been a cynical fraud. Enacted for the ostensible purpose of protecting American consumers from (purportedly) rapacious corporations taking advantage of dominant market share to gouge consumers with unconscionably high prices, antitrust law repeatedly has been used to prosecute and penalize American businesses for the opposite practice—driving down consumer prices.”
Read more in the full article here.
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