The Justice Department's anti-trust case against Microsoft was guaranteed to spawn an outburst of editorial lunacy in the mass media and the business press. With its sky-high profit margins and incredible market capitalization for such a young company, the Redmond software giant is worthy of the most reverent worship by anybody obsessed with individual financial gain.

The Seattle-area business press has predictably gone to bat for Microsoft following the Justice Department's proposal to break up the software giant. The Eastside Business Journal published a ridiculous pro-Microsoft rant in its April 28 issue by Alex Tabarrok of The Independent Institute, a think tank based in Oakland. Of course he characterizes the Justice Department's case against Microsoft as an attack on "entrepreneurialism." "Entrepreneurs," like Microsoft--no longer a hometown startup but one of the world's largest monopolies--create wealth, "anti-entrepreneurs," like the Justice Department, destroy it. He purports that the Justice Department is now the greatest anti-entrepreneur of all time. His argument? Just look at the amount of the loss of Microsoft's market capitalization from April 1 through April 24, which was $208 billion.

Tabarrok goes on to point out that this loss to Microsoft shareholders amounts to $768 per person in the United States. What he doesn't point out is that stock losses for investors can be written off on tax returns as capital losses. The average American who owns no stock is forced to indirectly pay for the cost of stock losses.

Given Tabarrok's argument that the anti-trust case against Microsoft is the epitome of anti-entrepreneurialism because of the sharp drop in Microsoft's share price, are we to conclude that the IRS is the ultimate defender of entrepreneurialism because it allows investors to write off these losses? Is it the federal government that creates wealth or Tabarrok's sacred "entrepreneurs"? Tabarrok is indirectly, perhaps unwittingly, pointing out a federal government policy that is favorable to investors, but unfavorable for the majority of people who don't own stock. He can call this "capitalism" if he wants to, but it has nothing to do with its classic definition, which has always meant no state intervention in the economy.

There always has been and always will be a powerful federal government guiding and planning the economy as long as there is a United States. Corporate executives know this. That is why they hire armies of lobbyists to advocate on their companies' behalf in Washington D.C. They know they need a powerful, centralized nation-state protecting them from market forces. Of course, the minute working people demand social democracy in any form, "conservative" media pundits immediately denounce such policy as "socialist" or "communist." I just wish they would stop deceitfully characterizing the corporate socialism they love as "capitalism."