OK, lets talk about antitrust law and the plight of persecuted Mormons. The basic gist of antitrust law is that you cannot use a monopoly to engage in anticompetitive activity such as price fixing. This seems like a sensible rule, but the devil is in the details. One of the major problems, of course, is to figure out what constitutes the relevant market. For example, Apple corporation has a monopoly over the production of iPods. Should they be subject to antitrust laws? What is the market in questions? iPods? MP3 players? Music players? Entertainment devices? Another example might be the McDonalds in the Kingstowne shopping center a couple of blocks from my house. It has a monopoly on fast-food hamburgers in the corner of Springfield wedged between Annandale and Burke. Is this the market? Or is the market fast food (there is a Subway in the shopping center), restaurants (there is a Chinese place there as well), or perhaps it is Fairfax County (there are a MacDonald’s down the road in either direction)? In short, the presence or absence of monopoly hinges entirely on how you define the relative market.<\/p>\n
Both liberal and conservative Mormons like to claim the mantle of persecution. There seems to be a certain nobility in minority status, and it makes a nice rhetorical trump as well as providing a salve for certain emotional wounds. Liberal Mormons point out, quite correctly as it happens, that they are a minority in the Church. Most active Mormons seem to be political and theological conservatives. Hence, Kerry-voting Sunstone subscribers must swim against the stream in Sunday School class, etc. etc. Conservative Mormons point out, quite correctly as it happens, that they are a minority in the world at large. Most people are not conservative Mormons. Furthermore, if one picks a particular slice of the world at large — say academia or the “media elite” — then there are few people that share those ideas and commitments nearest and dearest to the hearts of conservative Mormons. They must swim against the stream. Minority status, like monopoly power, depends on the definition of the market.<\/p>\n
If I were really ambitious, I would come up with some theory that defined what was the relevant market for each rhetorical situation. At this point, however, imagination fails me. I never took antitrust, and at work I avoid antitrust cases like the plague. (Would you want to spend hundreds of hours looking at memos on the price of pork bellies or textile fibers? Me neither.) Rather, I am inclined to think that attempts to claim the rhetorical high ground by asserting minority Mormon status are pretty vacuous. At the very least, this move tells us much less than our discussions might suggest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
OK, lets talk about antitrust law and the plight of persecuted Mormons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2470\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}