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September 25, 2006

Wonderful Irony

Something occurred to me tonight: the reason we are so dependent on oil today might very well be because of early Progressives. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Progressives were on an anti-trust bender. I've always looked at this as a generally good thing, because it broke up a lot of monopolies, which tend to be very destructive.

But tonight I was thinking in a longer time frame. While the monopolies are very destructive in the short term, in the long term, don't they just spawn unorthodox competition? After all, if you look at Microsoft's rather blatant destruction of any and all competition, its eventual outcome was the open source movement, typified by operating systems like Linux and applications like Apache. Open source is largely immune to Microsoft's bullying tactics, and that has given many other companies (not least of them being Apple) a lot of breathing room that they didn't have before. Now you can compete with Microsoft without being crushed; that was not true in the 1990s.

So might it not also be true that, had Standard Oil not been broken up under anti-trust laws, that some very unexpected opposition would have arisen, giving both new options for those who wished to avoid using Standard Oil's monopoly product, and those wishing to compete with Standard Oil? And might it be that we would have been off of any serious dependency on oil by the end of the 1930s? And if so, aren't Progressives to a large degree responsible for the situation they now so decry, our dependence on oil from the Middle East to maintain our economies?

Well, at the very least, I think it's fair to say that free markets produce better solutions than government regulation, though they are sometimes slower than government regulation.

Posted by jeff at September 25, 2006 10:10 PM

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Comments

Ah yes, "progressives!"

If you expand the definition of progressives to include those industrialism experts that helped change the management of the American labor force to accommodate mass production (and I do), then you can also say that progressives gave us the parallel -- and connected -- rise of big business and big government.

Progressives also took the locally-centered public schools and created giant, soul-crushing school districts. John Dewey, in particular, was a committed socialist who despised the notion of individualism for the common man.

Some progressives were promoters of eugenics, and Margaret Sanger (of Planned Parenthood fame), may have wanted to eliminate African-Americans entirely by attrition through forced sterilization. What do you call a socialist who is also a racist, and believes in genocide? A "Nazi," of course! People like Sanger and writer Jack London were "nazis" before Hitler was.

I cringe at the adjective "progressive" when someone uses it in a positive way. I say we sterilize them and put them to work on high-security prison farms.

Posted by: Roderick Reilly at September 26, 2006 4:41 PM

Collateral damage. Standard Oil wasn't the target for the Sherman Antitrust Act: large financial companies were.

Another example of the routing-around behavior you noted in Microsoft/Linux is computer output technology. Dot matrix and laser printers were developed largely because IBM had line printer technology sewed up through its patents. However, I doubt I'd look at that as a good thing—that's the broken window fallacy.

Posted by: Dave Schuler [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 28, 2006 11:43 AM