Leave Apple alone!!

A law by which anyone can be found guilty is no law at all.

Walter Block's joke about antitrust goes like this.  Three men were sitting in prison, inmate 1 asks inmate 2 "what are you in for?"  "The government said I was guilty of price gouging for charging over the market price".  Inmate 1 then he asks inmate 3 the same question; he replies "well, I was guilty of charging under the market price so I was arrested for predatory pricing."  They turn to inmate 1 who confesses, "I was arrested for charging the market price and am accused of collusion and cartelizing."  Antitrust is a sham, and sometimes I feel like slapping Teddy Roosevelt right off Mount Rushmore.

Apple is under attack again by the FTC.  What are they guilty of?  How about being awesome?  Even if you don't like Apple, there's no reason for this.  Apple has built an amazing infrastructure for distributing digital content, they have built amazing hardware to play it back on, and one can argue they have even made Apple into an ethos.  Despite the competition, and some higher performing hardware (like some 4G phones) it continues to dominate the market.  All Apple actors (consumers, producers, and developers) have come to the Apple platform voluntarily.  App makers could abandon iTunes altogether and develop solely for the Android.  If Apple's fees and app regulation are so onerous, why don't they?  Well, I suppose if they do become unbearable then the developers and consumer will abandon Apple because it's voluntary and not compulsory like some other organization I know.

Whatever you think of Apple, in no way does the FTC have a right to tell them how to run their business.  Besides the obvious reason that no injustice has occurred, the government is the worst offender of antitrust principles.  The government claims monopoly privileges for itself.  It claims the right to prevent any and all private participants from entering the market.  Antitrust supposedly protects the public from monopoly activity, high prices, and lack of competitive options in an industry.  This is exactly what the government claims must exist in every area it over sees.  The FTC itself claims the right to regulate commerce and to extract whatever funds it needs for its operations from businesses and the public.  It is sick that this kind of double speak is allowed, and that companies like Apple and the public at large suffer because of it.

Admittedly, a lot of what's said at LewRockwell.com is unlikely to attract the non-libertarian to libertarianism.  Knowing this full well, I loved this post back in June about bureaucrats being upset about their crummy government issued blackberrys (blackberries?).  What I found interesting about the post, factually, is that Apple has a relatively small lobbying budget.  I don't know if Google's and Microsoft's lobbying power has anything to do with the FTC investigation, but how sad would it be if millions had to be spent on lobbyists just to avoid expensive government investigation?  Ron Paul doesn't get visited by lobbyists because his exercise of government power is minimal and thus provides no incentive for the corporate lobbyist.  Leftists who claim to protect the public and are all too willing to use government power are also too easily duped into furthering the goals of one corporation over another thus extending and strengthening fascism in America.  Albert J. Nock once believed the state was an effective force for helping the weak, but he soon realized that not only was the state's modus operandi completely unjustifiable -- "rooted in conquest and confiscation" -- but it was the least effective tool to help those whom he cared to protect.