[CarolinaGuitarman]

"When someone else INTENT becomes crystal clear, and that intent is to injure others, then there is good reason to act."

All competition is an intent to injure another company. When a business is too successful at what it does, when some magic threshold is passed, then they have become *anticompetitive* and must be stopped.


Collectivist nonsense. You have a right to drive others out of business as long as you don't initiate force against anybody.

"This is similar to freedom of speech and the "man shouting fire in a crowded theater."

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech; this is basic property rights. An oil company owns their oil and has a right to sell it at WHATEVER price they wish. If nobody wants it at their prices, then they won't be able to sell it. If they give it all away, that is their right too. If that puts other companies out of business, too bad. Their is no *right* to business success; if you can't keep up with the free market then you don't deserve to be in business.

Anti-trust is anti-capitalist.

[js1138]

I'm going to jump in here with a question. What principle do you follow if the property was originally a gift from the government?

[xzins]

I do not have the freedom to use my property in a way that injures my neighbor. For example, I do not have the right to store radioactive nuclear waste on it.

Also, in a free market, competition is not designed to drive your competitors out of business.

It is designed as a place where customers can bid on available commodities.

If the farmer's market in our area had someone come in week after week giving away what everyone else was selling, then it would surely drive the others out of business.

Just because I have water in the desert, it doesn't make it ethical for me refuse water to a man dying of thirst until he signs over all his property and accounts.

The market might be able to bear it at that moment in that situation, but it is clear extortion.

[atlaw]

You have a right to drive others out of business as long as you don't initiate force against anybody. . . . Anti-trust is anti-capitalist.

I respectfully disagree. The Sherman, Clayton, and Robinson-Patman Acts have been rather successful in maintaining a competitive marketplace for the last century. The notion that price fixing and monopolistic predation is an inherent, and indeed virtuous, element of a free market strikes me as somewhat akin to the notion that fraud is a competitive virtue. There are thresholds of human connivance that we have, as a society, declared inviolable.