A pair of free-market Republican Senators, Jon Kyl of Arizona and Sam Brownback of Kansas, have asked Mr. Bush to reconsider the appointment on grounds that Mr. Barnett's activist antitrust bent is both out of step with Administration policy and likely to do economic damage over the next three years.

Mr. Barnett has been one of the leaders of a Bush antitrust policy that has too often been hard to distinguish from Bill Clinton's. While the Administration did settle the Microsoft case, it somehow saw fit to block the proposed 2001 merger of United Airlines and US Airways on grounds that together they would have hurt competition. Both of the economic juggernauts later went into Chapter 11.

Mr. Barnett's signature case was Justice's 2004 lawsuit against Oracle, which was trying to acquire the business software firm PeopleSoft. Justice took an overly restrictive view of the software market in the case, choosing to ignore a legal precedent in the Sungard case that should have been a warning. And sure enough, Justice was routed in court.

Federal Judge Vaughn Walker, a Reagan appointee, found no fewer than 10 holes in the Justice argument. But afterward an unrepentant Mr. Barnett said, "I do not see the decision in Oracle/PeopleSoft as indicating any fundamental flaw in our theory or the way that we presented the case." Even though Justice chose not to appeal, Mr. Barnett still declared that he would "bring the case again."

Once again, I can't take these token GOP objections to antitrust seriously. If Kyl and Brownback are that concerned about the "economic damage" of antitrust policy, why didn't they object to the nominations of William Kovacic and Thomas Rosch--two of the most establishment antitrust voices out there--to the FTC? On Saturday both men were confirmed without debate or dissent. Kovacic was general counsel at the FTC during Bush's first term and played a role on par with Barnett in shaping merger review policy. Why did Kovacic get a free pass? And Kyl and Brownback, both members of the Judiciary Committee, supported legislation to give the Antitrust Division wiretap powers in all Sherman Act investigations, a virtually unlimited power to spy on businesses.

For some people, environmentalism is collectivism in drag. Such people use environmental causes and rhetoric not to change the political climate for the purpose of environmental improvement. Rather, for them, changing the society's politics is the end, and environmental policies are mere means to that end.

The unending argument in political philosophy concerns constantly adjusting society's balance between freedom and equality. The primary goal of collectivism -- of socialism in Europe and contemporary liberalism in America -- is to enlarge governmental supervision of individuals' lives. This is done in the name of equality.

People are to be conscripted into one large cohort, everyone equal (although not equal in status or power to the governing class) in their status as wards of a self-aggrandizing government. Government says the constant enlargement of its supervising power is necessary for the equitable or efficient allocation of scarce resources.

Therefore, one of the collectivists' tactics is to produce scarcities, particularly of what makes modern society modern -- the energy requisite for social dynamism and individual autonomy. Hence collectivists use environmentalism to advance a collectivizing energy policy. Focusing on one energy source at a time, they stress the environmental hazards of finding, developing, transporting, manufacturing or using oil, natural gas, coal or nuclear power.

A quarter of a century of this tactic applied to ANWR is about 24 years too many. If geologists were to decide that there were only three thimbles of oil beneath area 1002, there would still be something to be said for going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.

Bo Cowgill talked about Google’s internal markets. They wrote their own software from scratch, following the IEM model. Traders buy a basket of claims in order to sell a claim. Usability and politics were the biggest issues for them. The company contributes money in an account for each Google employee, which they can then trade. Each participant’s account is cashed out at the end of each quarter. They get as many lottery tickets as they had cash from liquidating claims. (i.e. money you don’t invest doesn’t earn anything in the lottery.) Prizes are then awarded to lottery winners; this eliminates the incentive (common in play money markets with prizes for top performers) to take extreme chances in order to boost your odds of being the single top performer. A legal issue they had to contend with in selecting claims to bet on was that information on some outcomes is controlled by the SEC. If employees find out what is happening in some areas, they might become subject to SEC rules for insiders, and their stock trading restricted. The operators of the market chose subjects where that likelihood seemed small.

An article on Dec. 2 about the C.I.A. leak investigation misstated a word in a quotation from an article about the case that appeared on Time magazine's Web site in July 2003. The Time article said "some government officials" - not "some administration officials" - had told Time and the syndicated columnist Robert Novak that "Valerie Plame is a C.I.A. official who monitors the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." (Later developments in the leak case revealed that in fact the information had been disclosed by administration officials, I. Lewis Libby Jr. and Karl Rove.)

Fair enough. Now take a look at what Paul Krugman wrote in his July 21, 2003 column:

...both the columnist Robert Novak and Time magazine say that administration officials told them that they believed that Mr. Wilson had been chosen through the influence of his wife, whom they identified as a C.I.A. operative.

We're waiting, Barney. Thanks to Tom Maguire for connecting the dots, as he does so very, very well.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 4:58 PM | link