Even seemingly benign actions may be interpreted as criminal conduct. For instance, firms must be wary of becoming too efficient, too productive, or offering products that satisfy their customers' needs too conveniently—a danger well illustrated by the recent action against Microsoft (

). The Microsoft case was also notable for the total lack of consensus among the foremost legal experts as to how, if at all, antitrust law should apply. In their most crucial decisions, business leaders constantly risk running afoul of legislation whose bounds are unknown even to attorneys; consequently, those decisions cannot be based on market efficiency alone, but most always take into account political considerations.

A similar minefield is presented by anti-discrimination labor laws, which prohibit "unfair" discrimination by private employers against a particular class or classes of workers. We are concerned here only with laws regulating private employment. Laws pertaining to governmental employment are, in essence, merely a device by which governments administer their own internal operations; they do not constitute a form of initiated force or intervention into the market.

Discrimination issues often give rise to intensely emotional attitudes, including strong moral indignation. We must therefore emphasize that our first priority is to analyze the effects of anti-discrimination legislation dispassionately, not to pass a final ethical judgment upon it. In order to minimize emotional prejudices in this discussion, we shall address laws that seek to protect members of an abstract "class C," who are not specifically identified.

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