Anti-trust Legislation believe that anti-trust legislation should be reformed. The main reasons for it are that the 19th century antitrust laws, i.e. Sherman Act, 1890 and Clayton Act, 1914, currently cannot be applied successfully in 21st century computer and telecommunications marketplace (Glanz, 33). This became evident in the case between Microsoft and the Justice Department. The biggest problem was that the Justice Department was applying 19th century law on the computer business, without heeding the fact that the nature of technology is different from that of the traditional goods. For example, Microsoft currently licenses its Windows operating system to PC makers on condition that they must also use its Internet browser Explorer. However, according to the Justice Department it was a monopoly, a clear case of antitrust legislation, even though it was evident that an integrated suit of technology makes economic as well as common sense. The other reason for…...
mlaReferences
Glanz, William, "Digital Dirty Dozen," Insight on the News, Vol. 18, Issue 10, (2002): 33.
Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century, New York, Knopf, 1991: 301-305.
Additionally, he argued that the best interest of the consumers, as promoted by Gate's organization, was in fact not the core element of new endeavors, as the company had argued, but that whenever a new product or service was being projected, this would be done in order to serve the financial interests of the organization rather than increase customer utility (Kegel, 2006).
In order to better understand why the above mentioned actions were ethical or unethical, it is best to assess them in light of three ethical perspectives. From the standpoint of the utilitarian perspective, the company is able to seek out those actions which maximize its gains, but in doing this, it must remain aware of the needs of others. More specifically, they can work towards their goals as long as these do not impede with the goals of others (Leiss, 1988). From this standpoint, the behavior of Microsoft was…...
mlaReferences:
Cooper, C., 1999, Microsoft Antitrust Judgment: Winners and Losers, ZD Net, last accessed on August 14, 2009http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,2074984,00.htm
Dale, N.B., Lewis, J., 2004, Computer Science Illuminated, 2nd Edition, Jones & Bartlett Publishers
Hunter, D., 2005, More Microsoft Employees to Get Antitrust Training, HunterStrat, / last accessed on August 14, 2009http://www.hunterstrat.com/news/more-microsoft-employees-to-get-antitrust-training
Kegel, D., 2006, Corporate Ethics, Dan Kegel's Web Hostel, last accessed on August 14, 2009http://www.kegel.com/corporate_ethics.html
Of course, in recent years, this power has been diluted somewhat thanks to the rise of collective bargaining. Nonetheless, the fact that for so many years baseball has been characterized as a game rather than interstate commerce worked to the benefit of the industry as a whole.
If the exemption were repealed, apparently only possible through act of Congress, players and teams could sue the league if their movements were restricted and limitations placed on their ability to conduct business for themselves (Rovell). MLB could still manage how teams and players moved, but the repeal of the exemption would eliminate their absolute control over these movements. Obviously, this would have a significant impact on the baseball industry, but would not be necessarily devastating. Other sports have persisted despite not having antitrust exemptions, so there is little reason to expect that baseball couldn't adapt as well.
orks Cited
Belth, Alex. "Ending Baseball's Antitrust…...
mlaWorks Cited
Belth, Alex. "Ending Baseball's Antitrust Exemption." Baseball Prospectus. 26 Nov. 2001. 15 July 2008 http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/Courses/econ352jpw/readme/Baseball%20Prospectus%20-%20Ending%20Baseball%27s%20Antitrust%20Exemption.htm .
Greenberg, David. "Baseball's Con Game." Slate. 19 July 2002. 15 July 2008 http://www.slate.com/id/2068290/ .
Morrissey, Mo. "Baseball Labor Relations: Anti-Trust Exemptions & the Reserve Clause." Associated Content. 19 Oct. 2007. 15 July 2008 http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/421296/baseball_labor_relations_antitrust.html .
Rovell, Darren. "Baseball's Antitrust Exemption: Q & a." ESPN: Baseball. 6 Dec. 2007. 15 July 2008 http://espn.go.com/mlb/s/2001/1205/1290707.html .
separation of powers and federalism. How do these central architectural features of American government seek to support Thomas Jefferson's perspectives; "That government is best which governs least." Why from the view of many business executives is government "gridlock" good?
Separation of powers is that element of the American government designed to protect the nation from tyranny and to, as far as possible, keep the power of the nation decentralized. Federalism, while certainly not designed to promote tyranny, is designed to strengthen the power of the government to act and govern the nation, centralizing power into a strong formal national government. Each of these aspects of modern American government have different implications for business.
According to Thomas Jefferson, "That government is best which governs least." The separation of powers helps to assure that the different branches of the government balance each other sufficiently that no single branch can govern so much that…...
U.S. laws
There are a number of different laws that govern fair, balanced and competitive practices. One major category is the antitrust laws. Antitrust laws seeks to create a competitive environment by preventing companies from obtaining the ability to abuse their market positions. Ensuring that each industry and market has a healthy amount of competition has been the work of a series of acts that govern antitrust practices.
The most significant piece of antitrust legislation is the Sherman Act, which was passed in 1890 in order to define antitrust activities. The act was passed in response to monopoly abuses on the part of a number of companies, and the recognition that a successful capitalist economy required at least enough market intervention on the part of government to prevent the formation of unnatural monopolies (FTC, 2014).
There have been subsequent laws that have enhanced the Sherman Act, and refined it, largely because the original…...
mlaReferences
DoJ (2014). Horizontal merger guidelines. U.S. Department of Justice. Retrieved November 25, 2014 from http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/guidelines/hmg-2010.html
FTC. (2014). The antitrust laws. Federal Trade Commission. Retrieved November 25, 2014 from http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/antitrust-laws
FTC. (2014, 2) Price discrimination: Robinson-Patman violations. Federal Trade Commission. Retrieved November 25, 2014 from http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/price-discrimination-robinson-patman
OUSTR. (2014) Anti-dumping Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Retrieved November 25, 2014 from http://www.ustr.gov/trade-agreements/wto-multilateral-affairs/wto-issues/trade-remedies/anti-dumping
A favorite target for conspiracists today as well as in the past, a group of European intellectuals created the Order of the Illuminati in May 1776, in Bavaria, Germany, under the leadership of Adam Weishaupt (Atkins, 2002). In this regard, Stewart (2002) reports that, "The 'great' conspiracy organized in the last half of the eighteenth century through the efforts of a number of secret societies that were striving for a 'new order' of civilization to be governed by a small group of 'all-powerful rulers.' The most important of these societies, and the one to which all subsequent conspiracies could be traced, is the Illuminati founded in Bavaria on May 1, 1776 by Adam Weishaupt" (p. 424). According to Atkins, it was Weishaupt's fundamental and overriding goal to form a secret organization of elite members of Europe's leading citizens who could then strive to achieve the Enlightenment version of revolutionary…...
mlaReferences
American Psychological Association. (2002). Publication manual of the American Psychological
Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: Author.
Anderson, J. (1981, 1723). The charges of a Free-Mason extracted from the ancient records of lodges beyond the sea, and of those in England, Scotland, and Ireland, for the use of the lodges in London: To be read at the making of new brethren, or when the master shall order it. Reprinted in The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, by M.C. Jacob, 279-285. London and Boston: Allen & Unwin in Harland-
Jacobs at p. 237.
, 93 F. 3d 1358 (CA7 1996) for its statement that "monopsony pricing is analytically the same as monopoly...pricing and is so treated by the law." ased on this determination that the two concepts are analytically similar, the Court thus concludes that therefore "similar legal standards should apply to claims of monopolization and to claims of monopsonization." Reasoning that predatory-pricing is fundamentally an act of monopolization and that predatory-bidding is fundamentally an act of monopsonization, and that both claims involve the deliberate use of unilateral pricing measures for anticompetitive purposes, the Court finds that the logically same legal standard should therefore govern actions brought on both.
ased on this reasoning, the Court concludes that "the general theoretical similarities of monopoly and monopsony combined with the theoretical and practical similarities of predatory pricing and predatory bidding convince us that our two-pronged rooke Group test should apply to predatory-bidding claims." Accordingly, under the…...
mlaBibliography
Bolton, Patrick, et. al. (2000): Predatory Pricing: Strategic Theory and Legal Policy. 88 Geo.L.J. 22239.
Brooke Group Ltd. v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 509 U.S. 209 (1993).
Hovencamp, Herbert. (1994): Federal Antitrust Law Policy: The Law of Competition and Its Practice. Minneapolis: West Group Publishing.
Khan v. State Oil Company, 53 F.3d 1358 (CA7 1996).
Primary Source Analysis
The document and work under review within this section is a chapter that is titled Wealth Against the Commonwealth. It was authored by Henry Damarest Lloyd and it came out in 1894. The work was published in New York. The opening salvo from the work is that nature is wealthy but that man is poor. What is meant by this is that not everyone is fed when it comes to the men and women of the people and it is asserted that this is true since time began, to use the words of the author himself. A perfect example of this is say when Lloyd says "the majority have never been able to buy enough of anything, but this minority have too much of everything to sell" (Lloyd, 1894). Lloyd then talks about a major dichotomy that exists when it comes to liberty. Lloyd talks about how liberty…...
mlaBibliography
Brittanica. 2016. "Henry Demarest Lloyd - American Journalist." Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Demarest-Lloyd .
Cole, Lee. 2016. "Misguided Government Policies Prolonged Great Depression." UCLA Newsroom. http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/misguided-government-policies-80595 .
Lloyd, H. D. 2016. "Excerpt From Henry Demarest Lloyd Wealth Against Commonwealth 1894 < 1876-1900 < Documents < American History From Revolution To Reconstruction And Beyond." Let.Rug.Nl. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1876-1900/excerpt-from-henry-demarest-lloyd-wealth-against-commonwealth-1894.php .
Thoma, Mark. 2016. "The Great Lesson From The Great Recession." The Fiscal Times. http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2013/08/27/The-Great-Lesson-from-the-Great-Recession .
It is important that we be allowed to pursue our business interests with a minimum of government interference. Given that the FTC and DoJ already enforce antitrust legislation, it seems unethical that the FCC also enforce such codes, specifically focused on our particular business.
I believe DI should support the proposed changes. The company would benefit from the opportunity to expand our media properties both horizontally and vertically. It would also give us greater opportunity to exit the business should we so desire in future. Ethical concerns about media consolidation are largely unfounded, especially in light of the way that the Internet provides a low-cost voice for alternative media outlets. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has significantly reduced barriers to entry in the television business, so the free market can dictate which outlets will have an audience and which will not. Moreover, the FCC's Fairness Doctrine, upheld by the Supreme…...
mlaWorks Cited
Klinenberg, Eric. (2006). Mega-Merger Mania. The Nation. Retrieved December 16, 2008 at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060703/klinenberg
No author. (2008). Hart-Scott-Rodino. Federal Trade Commission. Retrieved December 16, 2008 at http://www.ftc.gov/bc/hsr/
McChesney, Robert W. & Nichols, John. (2008). Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay Tuned. The Nation. Retrieved December 16, 2008 at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080616/mcchesney
No author. (2008). Telecommunications Act of 1996. Federal Communications Commission. Retrieved December 16, 2008 at http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), a federation of autonomous labor unions in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, and U.S. dependencies, was formed in 1955 by the merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Heavily involved in politics, the AFL-CIO's primary function is to lobby on behalf of organized labor and mediate disputes between its member unions. In 1999 the AFL-CIO included 68 national and international unions that had a U.S. membership of over 13 million people. Individual workers were not members of the AFL but only of the affiliated local or national union. Opposed to the idea of a labor party, the AFL was a relatively conservative political force within the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th cent. (Gompers, 1967)
The CIO's Political Action Committee, headed by Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing…...
mlaBibliography
Galenson, Walter. The CIO Challenge to the AFL: a History of the American Labor Movement. Harvard University Press; 1992.
Gompers, Samuel. Seventy Years of Life and Labor: An Autobiography. Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, June 1967.
Dubofsky, Melvyn. Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920, Harlan Davidson, May 1975.
Goldfield, Michael. The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States by University of Chicago Press, May 1989.
Further diversification is also recommended. Given the pace of change in the industry, the reliance on PC operating platforms and office software packages must be reduced. The risk of an entirely new technological paradigm emerging is high, so Microsoft must therefore diversify its revenue streams in order to defend against this threat. Overall, Microsoft's strategic thrust is strong and its operating results fantastic. The company must guard against major non-strategic threats such as technological change or acute damage from financial scandal. If Microsoft deals with these two issues effectively, the will remain in good position to continue to build their revenues in the coming years.
orks Cited
Financial and operating unit information from Reuters. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyProfile?symbol=MSFT.O
No author. (2004) Microsoft Corporation. Funding Universe Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Microsoft-Corporation-Company-History.html
Microsoft 2008 Annual Report. (2008). Microsoft. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/index.html
No author. (2006). Microsoft's Multiple Challenges: Is Its Size…...
mlaWorks Cited
Financial and operating unit information from Reuters. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyProfile?symbol=MSFT.O
No author. (2004) Microsoft Corporation. Funding Universe Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Microsoft-Corporation-Company-History.html
Microsoft 2008 Annual Report. (2008). Microsoft. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.microsoft.com/msft/reports/ar08/index.html
No author. (2006). Microsoft's Multiple Challenges: Is Its Size a Benefit or a Burden? Wharton School of Business. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1478
al-Mart is a price maker, as any monopoly would be. The company is famous for dictating prices to its suppliers. However, with regards to buyers, al-Mart is not a price maker. It is reasonable to assume that the company can raise some prices somewhat without losing market share; it is not true that they can raise all prices near indefinitely without losing market share. al-Mart has a captive audience, so they could raise their prices without significantly compromising their business, but other competitors would be able to exploit those increases and customers would be able to take their business elsewhere.
The demand curve for a true monopoly is negatively sloped, as is al-Marts, but al-Mart would lose all of its customers if it raised its price high enough, whereas a true monopoly would not. Indeed, a true monopoly seeks to maximize profit by finding the position on the demand curve where…...
mlaWorks Cited
Financial information from Reuters. Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/incomeStatement?stmtType=INC&perType=ANN&symbol=WMT.N
Schendler, Brent. (2005) Wal-Mart's $288 Billion Meeting Fortune Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/04/18/8257009/index.htm
Fishman, Charles. (2003) the Wal-Mart You Don't Know. Fast Company Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html
Boyle, Matthew & Arora, Rupali. (2007) a Green Giant Warms up to Wal-Mart. Fortune Retrieved December 8, 2008 at http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/16/news/companies/walmart_nemesis.fortune/index.htm
Monopolies and Trusts:
Appropriate Areas for Government Intervention?
Capitalism is the economic system that has dominated the United States virtually since the day of its independence. A social and economic system based on the recognition of individual rights; capitalism demands that owners' rights to control, enjoy, and dispose of their own property must be respected. In a capitalist system, the purpose of government is to protect individual economic rights, and to make sure that no one individual, or group may employ physical or coercive force upon any other group or individual. The success of capitalism is well evident. The surpluses that this system produces have enabled individuals to experiment; to create new products, and market new ideas. These private surpluses are traded in a free market in direct competition with other buyers and sellers. Such competition is best represented by the efforts of two or more parties acting independently to secure the…...
Finance-dominated proponents also maintain that boom economic periods generate a more varied divergence of valuations that fuel merger activity (Medlen 2007). In this regard, Medlen concludes that, "Taken collectively, these understandings may explain some of the merger activity in booms, but they involve certain asymmetries that undercut their explanatory power. High stock valuations allow stock to be utilized as currency and collateral for takeovers; yet stock booms also make targets expensive" (p. 202). Moreover, despite the commonly held perception that mergers are a "quick and dirty" way to grow a business and achieve organizational goals, there remains a lack of convincing empirical evidence in support of this perception (Medlen 2007). As Medlen points out, an "anomalous fact about mergers concerns the lack of evidence that mergers are profitable. This fact begs the question: why then are mergers carried out with such frequency and with such large levels of capitalization?"…...
mlaReferences
Ahern, K.A. & Weston, J.F. (2007). 'M&as: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.' Journal
of Applied Finance, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 5-7.
Babbie, E. (1990). Survey Research Methods (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
Publishing Company.
alt Disney Company Scenario
Scene: Fiscal Karat (FK), host of TV's Let's Talk Money, is seated at the center of an oak conference table. Let's Talk Money is a weekly PBS talk show that interviews business leaders and often finds government officials to debate certain ideas and programs. Tonight's episode features Mr. Michael McDuck (MM), CEO of alt Disney Company and Mr. Rigid B. Crat (RC), Senior Administrator for the U.S. Treasury's Anti-trust Division.
FK: Good evening and welcome to Let's Talk Money, your weekly adventure into provocative and interesting monetary topics ranging from mild to wild. Tonight, a special treat for the kid in us all -- Michael McDuck, CEO of alt Disney goes head to head with the Administration's Senior Anti-Trust Maven, Rigid B. Crat. elcome gentlemen!
First though, let's take a moment to establish a bit of background. The alt Disney Company is a multinational mass media company posting 2011…...
mlaWorks Cited
Disney Vows to Investigate Claims of ABuse at Factories. (2005, June). Retrieved from SACOM: http://sacom.hk/archives/66
J&J, Walt Disney, Kraft Foods Top Rankgin. (2010, October 13). Retrieved from Environmental Leader: http://www.environmentalleader.com/2010/10/13/jj-walt-disney-krafts-foods-top-csr-ranking/
Hearing: Are Government Contractors Exploiting Workers Overseas? (2011, November 2). Retrieved from Sparky - Keeping You Plugged In: http://mssparky.com/2011/10/hearing-are-government-contractors-exploiting-workers-overseas/
Areeda, P., & Hovenkamp, H. (2011). Fundamentals of Antitrust Law. New York: Kluwer Law.
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