Washington's parasites take aim at Apple

David Boaz

is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of "Libertarianism: A Primer"

Following in the distinguished footsteps of Microsoft and Google, Apple is the latest innovative company to be targeted by politicians and regulators for being too successful. Will it be sucked into Washington's "parasite economy"?

For more than a decade, Microsoft went about its business, developing software, selling it to customers, and - happily, legally - making money. Then in 1995, after repeated assaults by the Justice Department's antitrust division, Microsoft broke down and started playing the Beltway game - defensively at first.

Washington politicians and journalists sneered at Microsoft's initial political innocence. A congressional aide said, "They don't want to play the D.C. game, that's clear, and they've gotten away with it so far. The problem is, in the long run they won't be able to."

The political establishment was essentially telling Bill Gates, "Nice little company ya got there. Shame if anything happened to it."

And Microsoft got the message: If you want to produce something in America, you'd better play the game. Contribute to politicians' campaigns, hire their friends, go hat in hand to a congressional hearing, and apologize for your success.

A decade later, it was Google. After a humble start in a Stanford dorm room, Google delivered a cheap and indispensable product and became the biggest success story of the early 21st century.

But in our modern politicized economy - which author Jonathan Rauch called the "parasite economy" - no good deed goes unpunished for long. Some policymakers threatened to create a federal Office of Search Engines to regulate Google. The George W. Bush administration wanted Google to turn over a million random Web addresses and records of all searches from a one-week period. Congress investigated how the company deals with the Chinese government's demands for censorship.

So, like Microsoft and other companies before it, Google opened a Washington office and hired well-connected lobbyists.