November 19, 1999

by Peter J.M. Orvetti

Comdex Comeback
Four More Years
Caribbean Crises

Comdex Comeback

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, speaking at the annual Comdex computer show in Las Vegas, declared that his company encourages innovation in the high-tech industry, AP reported. Gates indirectly responded to Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's finding that Microsoft is a monopoly that has the strength to unfairly undermine competitors. The speech was Gates's first public presentation since Jackson's November 5 decision.

"Here's the lesson that high-tech companies can glean from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings in the Microsoft case: If you're sufficiently ambitious, competent, and hard-working; if you're willing to risk your time and fortune; if you succeed at rising above your competition by serving customers with better products; then watch out, because our government will come down on your neck with the force and effect of a guillotine," writes Robert A. Levy in the commentary "Why Microsoft Should Have Won". "Jackson's knee-jerk recitation of the Justice Department's line is a mockery of objectivity, scornful of the facts, and congenial only to those who prefer a sterile marketplace in which vigorous competition becomes legally actionable. Let's start with the judge's big picture: an industry crippled because Microsoft's competitors are unable to innovate. Yet how to explain Netscape's $10 billion price tag, or continued market leadership by Microsoft arch-rivals Oracle, Intuit, AOL, Sun Microsystems, and RealNetworks? How to explain Apple's growth in both sales and profits? Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, recently crowed that 'Windows is dead' when it comes to new software applications. McNealy may be right. Despite Judge Jackson's snapshot view of the software market, the Internet has profoundly and permanently altered the dynamics. Will Microsoft lose out to consumer electronics products? McNealy doesn't know, and neither does Jackson. But those products are out there, they're selling well, and they are competition."

The Cato Policy Analyses "Microsoft Redux: Anatomy of a Baseless Lawsuit", "Microsoft and the Browser Wars: Fit To Be Tied", and "Dismal Science Fictions: Network Effects, Microsoft, and Antitrust Speculation" all address the Microsoft case.

Four More Years?

Diplomats from the United States and Bosnia met in Dayton, Ohio, last Saturday to discuss ways to fulfill the objectives of the Dayton Peace Accords signed in November 1995, AP reported. The 1995 negotiations brought together Muslim, Serb and Croat negotiators to seek an end to the war in Yugoslavia. An agreement was reached that stopped the fighting but produced a country divided between a Muslim-Croat federation and a Bosnian Serb republic, and virtually partitioned among the ethnic groups. Four years on, the Balkans remain a war zone.

At the time of the accords, Ted Galen Carpenter wrote in the Cato Foreign Policy Briefing "Holbrooke Horror: The U.S. Peace Plan for Bosnia": "The terms of the emerging peace accord to end the war in Bosnia are a blueprint for disaster. Washington foolishly insists on maintaining the fiction of a united Bosnian state while accepting a de facto partition. Renewed fighting is highly probable when the Serb self-governing 'entity' attempts to secede and merge with Serbia and the Muslim-dominated government tries to assert Bosnia's sovereignty. Indeed, a clash between Muslim and Croat forces is also possible, since any Muslim-Croat cooperation has been a matter of expediency. To enforce such an inherently unworkable settlement would be to recklessly put American treasure and lives at risk.

"Since Bosnia is little more than a battleground for contending ethno-religious factions, and the United States has no vital interests there, Washington should let those factions work out their own destiny, however long it takes. Only a settlement forged by the parties to the conflict--an agreement that reflects battlefield realities and the balance of political and military forces--has any chance of achieving a durable peace."

Caribbean Crises

Haitian President Rene Preval has condemned the expulsion of more than 2,000 Haitians from the Dominican Republic, AP reports. "We have already protested officially to the Dominican government," Preval said, demanding that deportations be carried out "in conformity with international norms." In other news from Haiti, CBS's "60 Minutes" reported that despite, and perhaps because of, USAID intervention, Haitian prisons are overcrowded and many suspects are forced to await trial for years on charges that would only earn them a month in prison if convicted.

U.S. policy in Haiti has been a part of the problem. "As desirable as political democracy and economic liberalism may be, recent and not-so-recent experience in Haiti suggests that using coercion to impose those systems is futile... If genuine, stable democracy is to flourish in Haiti, it will have to spring from civil society, which requires a functioning economy. The United States should welcome such a development, but it cannot accelerate, much less impose, it," wrote Ian Vásquez in the Cato Policy Analysis "Doing What We Can for Haiti".

In the Cato Policy Analysis "Washington's Dubious Crusade for Hemispheric Democracy", Vásquez elaborates: "[I]nterruptions in the constitutional order of Haiti, Peru, and Guatemala, and bloody coup attempts in Venezuela, indicate that democracy has not securely taken root in many of the region's countries. And the democracy-promotion mission can cause far more harm than good. For example, embargoes imposed by the OAS and the United Nations on Haiti have worsened the harsh living conditions of the vast majority of Haitians. Regional peacekeeping operations run the risk of turning into open-ended military missions. The OAS, either impressed by democratic formalism or realizing the limits of its influence, may embrace as 'democratic' leaders who are in fact authoritarian. Washington may also use the veil of promoting democracy to conceal items on its agenda that run contrary to the wishes of Latin American nations. The most effective ways for the United States to encourage civil society and prosperity in Latin America are to open U.S. markets to the region's goods and to serve as an attractive example of limited constitutional government."