From: Dick.Gray@bull.com To: extropians@extropy.com Date sent: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 16:38:57 -0700 Subject: Re: Joe's Universal Corporation (tm) Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
>
>
> Joe asks, "What about Standard Oil, Dick?"
>
> What about it? It was an innovative company that made kerosene available to
> the masses at very affordable prices. But when Rockefeller got a bit too
> ambitious, it lost a healthy chunk of market share to upstart competitors -
> long before anybody thought to invoke the newly-concocted "antitrust" laws
> against it.
>
> Your point was...?
>
> Dick
>
>
Historical revisionism in the servise of shoring up an indefensible
position becomes no one. Standard Oil had a stranglehold on the
vast preponderence of the oil supply and would undersell (below
their own cost - it's called 'dumping') "upstart" competitors out of
business in any region where they cropped up, at which point they
would jack their prices back up to usurious levels. They were tailormade
for government dissolution in the interests of the citizenry. Joe