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I never said fraud was a virtue. That would be stealing.

And market manipulation (for example, down-swing predatory pricing to eliminate competition, followed by shorting a cornered market and concomitant up-swing predatory pricing) differs from fraud principally in scale.

I am talking about being able to sell your property at whatever levels someone else agrees to purchase them. Or to give them away if you wish. Why is this so controversial?

It's not controversial. What's controversial is manipulation of the market place. You seem to be under the impression that markets are somehow self-immunized from connivance. They're not. You also seem to be applying microscopic market aphorisms to macroscopic market realities.

They [anti-trust regulations] have been a bludgeon used by the less successful businesses to get a piece of what they feel they are entitled to.

Curious view. Perhaps you have some examples in mind?

We tend to forget that our particular brand of capitalism is, on the whole, a fictional legal construct to begin with. Corporations and securities markets do not exist in nature. We created those legal fictions (and many more) to facilitate relatively pain-free failure and thereby encourage risk-taking.

The corporate and securities fictions are, however, also subject to abusive and manipulative practices by the unscrupulous. These manipulations have the unfortunate effect of truncating, and in many instances eliminating, the very behavior the fictional constructs were intended to facilitate (market risk-taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism).

Regulation of corporate and securities practices is necessary to prevent these manipulations and abuses. In short, we created a pretty good fictional economic beast, and we put it on measured leash to keep it from eating us.

I said: "There are thresholds of human connivance that we have, as a society, declared inviolable."

You said: "That doesn't make it moral."

I don't understand. Doesn't make what moral?

"And market manipulation (for example, down-swing predatory pricing to eliminate competition, followed by shorting a cornered market and concomitant up-swing predatory pricing)..."

Is not the governments business. An individual or a business should be free to sell their product at whatever price they see fit. It is not fraud in any way; as long as the product is what the contract said it was, nobody was wronged.

"You seem to be under the impression that markets are somehow self-immunized from connivance."

Not at all. When someone enters into a contract and doesn't live up to it, that is fraud. Trying to out-compete your business rivals is not fraud.

"Perhaps you have some examples in mind?"

IBM, Microsoft.

"You also seem to be applying microscopic market aphorisms to macroscopic market realities."

The individual is the proper unit of property rights. When individuals come together to form a corporation, they do not give up their property rights. Corporations have a right to sell their property at whatever prices they wish, just as the individuals that comprise them do.

" I don't understand. Doesn't make what moral?

Just because people have agreed to trample property rights doesn't mean it is moral. Just because people have agreed that success is to be regulated, doesn't make it moral.