Even after a century, his name still evokes the image of a giant bestriding the early electrical age.
Thomas Alva Edison owned or controlled most of the early patents necessary to build any electrical generating or transmission system. And if Edison was dedicated with a nearly manic zeal to one proposition, it was that America would be wired for electricity using his system, Direct Current -- not the silly and dangerous alternative proposed by that latecomer George Westinghouse, "Alternating Current."
Which is why American, to this day, runs on DC, right?
Um, wrong. In fact, America is wired with the Westinghouse system, and always has been.
Why? Because federal trust-busters stepped in to break up Edison's General Electric monopoly, requiring each region of the country to adopt its own, different, standards of electrical generation and transmission?
Of course not. That would have meant chaos. Direct Current fell by the wayside the same way Betamax and the eight-track tapes and the steam-powered automobile would pass into oblivion -- the invisible hand of "the market" eventually ruled, through the combination of thousands of individual free decisions, that Alternating Current was better.
You see, you can step up AC with transformers, and transport it over long distances. And you couldn't with Direct Current. End of story.
Now, entering another new century, America has produced new geniuses with names like Bill Gates. Mr. Gates' Microsoft developed a software package called Windows, and a web browser called Explorer, which now dominate 90 percent of the personal computer market.
And just as most of us are glad not to have to ask, when we buy an electrical appliance, whether it will plug into the wall in the next city or state, so most of us are glad, when we buy a software application, to know it's likely to be compatible with the operating system already mounted on our computers.
But today the federal government is not content to step aside and wait for competitors to offer us something better than Microsoft, just as Westinghouse improved on Edison, and Chevrolet on Henry Ford's Model T. Oh no.
Today, we are told Bill Gates is "arrogant," that he dared to tell his friends "this antitrust thing will blow over."
Mr. Gates was unwise, we are told. He did not drop to one knee and defer to the power of the federal government to instruct him how his business should be run.
Even the structure of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's ruling in the Microsoft anti-trust case -- rolling out his "findings of fact" while still holding the aloft the sword of an eventual verdict -- is designed not to punish any real crime, not to restore to the American public any purloined liberty, but rather to muscle Mr. Gates into sitting down and "negotiating a settlement" with the federals.
All that is required is that he kneel and kiss the ring, and consult some assistant federal prosecutors who have never run a lemonade stand, about how he "ought" to structure his company and price and package his products.
"Let's get to the real bottom line," advised the Wall Street Journal in a straight-talking editorial Nov. 8. "Washington's crusade against Microsoft has fulfilled its purpose, serving as a great lever to pry open the wallets of Silicon Valley. Where three years ago the technology plutocrats spent their surplus earnings on racing yachts and Ferraris and charity, now they patriotically send donations to Washington to support the fixer class and its retinue in the style to which they would like to become accustomed."
What the federal government deserves to have happen here is for Mr. Gates to go home and trigger a backdoor virus, erasing Windows from every computer where it's ever been mounted, transferring his assets out of Uncle Sam's reach and leaving behind only the message: "Have it your way. Good luck."
But that won't happen. Bill Gates has a fiduciary duty to preserve as much value as he can for his stockholders. And so he -- or his successors, if he's smart enough to take Ayn Rand's advice and go find himself a Galt's Gulch -- will indeed kneel down and enter into some amputational "settlement."
And, for a while, everything will seem fine.
What will be unseen is the next would-be entrepreneur, coming up with an idea that might be as good as Windows. Seized with enthusiasm, he will draw it all out on a placemat and show it to a corporate lawyer ... who will tell him there's no sense trying that in today's America. If it works, the federal government will just step in and take it over.
Visitors to Russia used to ask why even those who could afford to furnish the inside of their apartments handsomely, never cleaned up the decaying exteriors.
"What," they would ask, "so a Party member should notice and requisition the place, putting us out on the street?"
Now, Americans will have to learn this lesson, too.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His new book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid through Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas, Nev. 89127; by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
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Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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