Reminds me of that old adage. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." If you ask me, we should be handing out pamphlets with instructions, and basic tools/items needed for meal cooking to the homeless/poor. Giving the poor food just keeps them barely above water in a sad existence.
Unfortunately, in the country where I live, begging at traffic lights is a very lucrative business. Beggars often have "turf-wars" between each other for the best spots. Not only that, but they have sort of "pimps" that manage the child/disabled beggars, and take their money. And my word are a lot of them pushy, trying to guilt innocent motorists as they stop at the lights.
Let's not forget that these sorts of things bypass mandatory minimum wage laws. He'd be out of work entirely if the government decided to enforce mandatory minimums for workers that work part time watching ads.
Sure, he may be unable quite yet to get off the dole, but this is a step in the right direction. It's unfortunate that people have to live in such situations, but that is the way to true and meaningful change. Showing others that alternatives exist, and that they are valid examples despite a coercive and immoral system imposing restrictions around them.
Double-standards for the win. That is mob rule / democracy for you. The majority, in your examples, has dictated that they are unhappy about the poor in society using whatever free thing the library provides, and the law will change accordingly. This is by design, so please let's not then continue and cry about how it's a problem and unfair. Democracy, and the double-standard arguments revolving around it kind of remind me of free-speech. You can't say that you favor free speech and then change your mind when someone says something you don't like. Same goes for democracy; you can't suddenly change your mind when the majority agrees with something you don't. You can act to change it, but the will of the people has spoken. To say otherwise, is to denounce a basic tenet of democracy: majority agreement. If you do, then all you're doing is attempting to enforce your minority-opinion over the rest of us.
Of course the system is helpful in helping you comply with the tax laws. They have no reason to be unreasonable and detain you at the first hint of foul play or lying. It's like a farmer killing his cow the morning after it didn't yield any milk for the first time. The farmer will give the cow a break, send it to a greener pasture for a few days rest, and then voila, it's back to producing quality A-grade pure lactic money milk for the farmer again!! Oh, and did I mention that the cow is now super-happy and motivated to give the farmer even more money-milk?
I've been predicting this for a long time. A lot of armchair economists are. Yet curiously, no professional economists ever mention the scenario.
I'm not much inclined to trust the economist profession. Their recent track record has been terrible, and there seems to be nothing even approaching concensus on some very fundamental policy issues.
Then you're listening to the wrong economists. There are many economists out there, from different schools of thought that have predicted a lot of what's going on around us. Sadly, all you're exposed to is what the mainstream media currently deems worthy. You seem like a smart fellow, look it up, research. You may find that there are others out there that share your economic beliefs, some may even be economists that have thought these things out.
Who the hell are you to motivate anything? Seriously? It's not your place to intentionally devalue the worth of OUR accumulated capital. People will invest when they feel like it. Stuffing money in pickle jars, and under the bed is perfectly reasonable. It's better than what it is now where people are quite frankly forced to put their money in growing investments, whether they want to or not. You think that hoarding is somehow deleterious to the economy? Just wait till you find out what short-term profit seeking will do to people. Because that is exactly what inflation forces people to do; to grow and get profit, at any means necessary.
That's the problem with statists. They really have a bit of a know-it-all attitude when it comes to _other_ peoples' money. Just leave it be, and if you wish, you can damn well stimulate the economy with your own damn money. But leave the rest of us out of it.
What the fuck did I just spend 2 minutes watching? Two advertisements for some sort of IBM social engineering pep talk about hiring employees. FFS, Slashdot. Now I don't feel the slightest inclination to watch this stupid video. Too bad I already gave them the ad view on their stupid un-skippable advertisement video.
And they wonder why we rebel and bypass their artificial restrictions? One ad would have been enough, thank you, but they just had to push it.
By entrepreneurs eager to cash-in on wealthy school districts and the helicopter parents.
It's funny what kind of useless nonsense get's funded when people have free reign to spend other peoples' money.
capitalism = you get what you pay teachers
Lol, you think you have capitalism. It's no wonder that kids come out of public school in america the way they do. I hope you stick to your subject, instead of imparting your biased political and economic views on impressionable young minds. If that's not the case then shame on you.
Automation generally replaces many low paid jobs with fewer high paid jobs, saving the company a small percentage in the process. The people who "lose their jobs" then go on to other jobs, often after investing in some more training to be able to make themselves more valuable.
Don't come here with your fancy shmancy logic and reason regarding this topic. They tuk ur jewbs!!!
On a more serious note. People don't see things this way, they see it as someone losing their job, period. I guess it's a general lack of seeing the big picture, but for some that's a sad reality of life, they're stuck dealing with day to day.
Personally, I feel if someone loses their job, and can't find work due to automation they should get together with a few other people in the same situation. Give them a free ticket to the middle of nowhere, air drop some resources, and let them start a new city. Sometimes, a fresh and brutal new start can give people opportunities they never could get in the city. Also, it'll give those with motivation a chance to make it big in the new city. </hopeful_pipe_dream>
The answer is to distribute the benefits of automation. If your factory has 1000 workers each doing 40 hours a week, and automation makes 250 of those human jobs unnecessary, instead of laying off 250 people altogether while keeping the remaining 750 on a 40 hour schedule
And why would an employer be willing to put forth his or his company's capital into automation investment if only the workers reap the benefit? That's just silly, and no one would go for it.
Really, the harder you squeeze, the more sneaky, ruthless and cunning people will be to keep THEIR money. No matter how good people are, if they feel you are taking money from them that they feel they rightfully earned, they will not like it. It's not about good, or bad. It's about fairness, and the owner will feel it unfair to redistribute his wealth just as much as the lowly worker will feel it unfair that the employer has all that capital saved up and is thus able to make more money.
The government mandates they do unprofitable routes. The cost to do those routes comes from somewhere, and it comes from profits made on cheap routes. If it was a free enterprise company, it wouldn't be compelled by law to do such a thing. If it wasn't compelled by law to do those routes, and still ended up charging me lots for low cost routes, then I would be switching over to a competitor.
I never willingly paid for them to service long-distance, unprofitable routes. Just because I use their service, doesn't mean I should be subsidizing those that use the service a whole lot more than I do, by paying the same rates as them.
How do I compete with the mass market pricing of the Telco or cable service?
The assumption is that eventually the price to roll/run your own will be equal to or less than the ISP's. Bear in mind, that the price of using the ISP is not just the monetary cost. There are other costs involved, and they should be taken into account when making the comparison. More than likely, the ISP can undercut you due to economies of scale, and large contracts with other entities, so the other costs become very important to consider.
No one said it would be easy to vote with your wallet. It is sometimes very hard, made even more difficult in scenarios such as these due to barriers of entry raised by government regulations that were intended to force large ISP entities to play nice.
Call me weird, but your story reminds me a whole lot of this talk of gun registration and the subsequent disarming of the public that so many call for. Bullies play by their rules, and you're stuck with gimped rules to defend yourself with against them. Leaving you only one recourse, to cry for help. But what happens when no one comes which is so often the case?
You do. It usually happens in early November, when you choose which people you will send to DC to represent your interests.
Aww, isn't that cute. You actually think that holding elections every X years somehow gives you sanction to impose your collective will over me? Think again. You can't even morally reconcile the inherent and violent nature at the heart of a democratic system. Mob rule is the real name. And yes, 51% does count as mob rule.
That's all fine and dandy from a practical perspective. But you're still not giving people the choice, and the only arguments you can come up with for that is either "you've already used it thus you should pay for your use of it, no matter what", or "there is no way to determine that you used it thus everyone, including you, has to pay for it."
If you had given me the choice in the first place, then we wouldn't be in this mess, now would we?
I wish I could copy-paste your response to almost every single one of the people participating in this thread that claim the inverse is true. That the public mail delivery service is somehow mandated to do unfavorable routes, whereas the public mail services only cherry-pick the routes/destinations that are profitable.
something society has agreed to collectively spend money on.
Woah, hold on there, buddy. What is this thing you call "society", and am I not part of it? Is it some sort of entity that magically has my consent to agree to things on my behalf? Or is it something of a convenient construct that is used by the majority to bully everyone into paying for the things that the majority deems worthy of funding?
You speak as if we all had "consensus" to spend money on certain things. We did not, and it is simply immoral and convenient for you and your ilk to ignore the will of those that don't wish to pay for such things. And I will freely continue to bitch about public projects "losing money" because it is not theirs to lose in the first place.
I can mail a letter from Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska for 46 cents - that doesn't even cover the fuel required. FedEx and UPS don't directly deliver to areas of the country where it's not cost-effective to do so.
And who exactly do you think is paying for you to send that letter across such a distance, and as you almost say, at a loss? That's right, the people that aren't using the service. I personally feel no obligation to provide payment for something only someone else gets to use. If the state doesn't give people a choice in the matter, then it is nothing more than a majority-sanctioned bully at best, and thief/murderer/kidnapper at worst.
. Amtrak in the US has to run very unprofitable long-distance rail service and subsidize it by using the money it makes from its Northeast and California rail services.
You seem to talk about money as if it magically grows on trees, or comes out of ponies' asses. It does not, and you as the consumer are paying for it one way or another.
The other thing to consider is employment. Especially now, given the fact that suitable jobs for the majority of the population are going away with no replacement work on the horizon, we need to find something for people to do.
"You" need to do nothing of the sort. You need to bud out of peoples' lives, and deal with your own. Just because you have the brain capacity and job security padding to boot, doesn't mean you should be coming up with any theories as to how the unfortunate rest of society will survive in the supposedly impending "jobs" crisis. They'll make do, without your intervention or care. Attitudes like yours are precisely why unskilled people of today are out of jobs. They are told that it's okay and that government will "create" jobs for them, if only they vote for the better off people to pay for public works projects.
"There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced." - Thomas Sowell
Then explain to me how Train prices continue to rise, while we are "still pouring huge amounts of money into them as taxpayers" ?
To answer your obviously trollish comment/question. The reason that the prices are going up is because the private entites have a pseudo-monopoly in the market. One that is granted to them by government regulations. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and try to get a license to build a railway line? Or a licence to carry passengers? Don't know where to get them? Oh, guess you'll need a government-licensed lawyer to tell you all the regulations and draw up all the paper work.
If there was money to be made from it, then the private sector would be coming in droves. The fact that they don't is very telling. Perhaps there isn't any money to be made in delivering mail? Perhaps the populace is unwilling to spend more on their mail to actually make it profitable for the company to deliver? Perhaps it was running at a loss up until now, hidden by taxation. Or perhaps the private sector _wants_ to come in and make a profit, thinks it can make a profit, but there is something holding it back. Oh I dunno, perhaps some sort of government regulation? Yeah, that's probably it. Privatization means diddly, and is probably just going to make a few execs rich. The real problem is the regulation that is hiding behind the curtain, and it is preventing both privatization and free-market entities from starting up.
If you take my wording literally, sure. That's my bad for not clarifying it, but I wanted my comment to be succint.
Freedom doesn't mean you should be allowed to murder who you want because that would infringe on their freedom. Rather, their freedom to own their property, of which their body is the principal/base component.
For a concrete example, consider farmer Bob deciding whether to sell his corn to Archer Daniels Midland for $4.75 per bushel. Look at his options:
- Sell at the offered price.
- Not sell at all. That will probably cause him to lose his farm, because without this sale, he doesn't pay off the bank.
- Try to sell to someone else. But since there's no one besides ADM who buys corn in his area, the only way Bob could pull this off is to invent his own transport and distribution network, from scratch.
So what you have is not a free market, but a ADM-controlled market that is only free to ADM.
Wait, what? Please don't make contrived little examples to prove your point, without explaining the context from which they arise. Are you seriously telling us that some random guy called "Bob" decides to buy a giant/large farm in the middle of an area where his only potential customer would be "Archer Daniels Midland"?? Really? That is the single best concrete example you could come up with to prove your impression of libertarianism? You don't think that maybe Bob is an idiot for making a really really REALLY bad business investment?
How about another example. "Jack" the builder decides to open up a construction business. He invests capital and buys equipment, and he chooses the base of operations for his new business to be in the middle of the fucking Sahara desert. His only options are:
- Not sell at all.
- Hope to holy $DEITY that someone decides to want a building in the middle of the fucking Sahara desert.
Good, okay. Now that we have the silly concept of stupid examples to prove our point out of the way. What you describe may be a free market, but it's a free market where Bob and Jack are both free to be as stupid as they like in their business investments/decisions. I bid you farewell, statist.
The problem is that the company has an army of very good lawyers who can afford to drag the case through the courts for a decade while you go bankrupt.
That's a purely statist construct. The playing field has already been skewed in favor of corporations by virtue of the system your government has installed and fostered.
In fact, that's CURRENTLY a failing on the part of government and the current justice process. You go ahead and try suing a corporation for such damages, and see how far that gets you. They'll respond and probably win with "we were performing within government-declared and mandated safety regulations in our operating environment", or some other lawyer-speak. You think you need lots of funding and lawyers to sue a giant corporation for damages? Let us know how many lawyers and how much funding you'll need to prove that that regulation wasn't enough for your kid in order to change it in the law books. Hint, it's way beyond your budget, buddy.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of that old adage. "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." If you ask me, we should be handing out pamphlets with instructions, and basic tools/items needed for meal cooking to the homeless/poor. Giving the poor food just keeps them barely above water in a sad existence.
Unfortunately, in the country where I live, begging at traffic lights is a very lucrative business. Beggars often have "turf-wars" between each other for the best spots. Not only that, but they have sort of "pimps" that manage the child/disabled beggars, and take their money. And my word are a lot of them pushy, trying to guilt innocent motorists as they stop at the lights.
Let's not forget that these sorts of things bypass mandatory minimum wage laws. He'd be out of work entirely if the government decided to enforce mandatory minimums for workers that work part time watching ads.
Sure, he may be unable quite yet to get off the dole, but this is a step in the right direction. It's unfortunate that people have to live in such situations, but that is the way to true and meaningful change. Showing others that alternatives exist, and that they are valid examples despite a coercive and immoral system imposing restrictions around them.
Double-standards for the win. That is mob rule / democracy for you. The majority, in your examples, has dictated that they are unhappy about the poor in society using whatever free thing the library provides, and the law will change accordingly. This is by design, so please let's not then continue and cry about how it's a problem and unfair. Democracy, and the double-standard arguments revolving around it kind of remind me of free-speech. You can't say that you favor free speech and then change your mind when someone says something you don't like. Same goes for democracy; you can't suddenly change your mind when the majority agrees with something you don't. You can act to change it, but the will of the people has spoken. To say otherwise, is to denounce a basic tenet of democracy: majority agreement. If you do, then all you're doing is attempting to enforce your minority-opinion over the rest of us.
Of course the system is helpful in helping you comply with the tax laws. They have no reason to be unreasonable and detain you at the first hint of foul play or lying. It's like a farmer killing his cow the morning after it didn't yield any milk for the first time. The farmer will give the cow a break, send it to a greener pasture for a few days rest, and then voila, it's back to producing quality A-grade pure lactic money milk for the farmer again!! Oh, and did I mention that the cow is now super-happy and motivated to give the farmer even more money-milk?
Not sure what my comment regarding the prevailing nature of statists has to do with what you're saying? Can you elaborate?
I've been predicting this for a long time. A lot of armchair economists are. Yet curiously, no professional economists ever mention the scenario.
I'm not much inclined to trust the economist profession. Their recent track record has been terrible, and there seems to be nothing even approaching concensus on some very fundamental policy issues.
Then you're listening to the wrong economists. There are many economists out there, from different schools of thought that have predicted a lot of what's going on around us. Sadly, all you're exposed to is what the mainstream media currently deems worthy. You seem like a smart fellow, look it up, research. You may find that there are others out there that share your economic beliefs, some may even be economists that have thought these things out.
Who the hell are you to motivate anything? Seriously? It's not your place to intentionally devalue the worth of OUR accumulated capital. People will invest when they feel like it. Stuffing money in pickle jars, and under the bed is perfectly reasonable. It's better than what it is now where people are quite frankly forced to put their money in growing investments, whether they want to or not. You think that hoarding is somehow deleterious to the economy? Just wait till you find out what short-term profit seeking will do to people. Because that is exactly what inflation forces people to do; to grow and get profit, at any means necessary.
That's the problem with statists. They really have a bit of a know-it-all attitude when it comes to _other_ peoples' money. Just leave it be, and if you wish, you can damn well stimulate the economy with your own damn money. But leave the rest of us out of it.
End of rant.
What the fuck did I just spend 2 minutes watching? Two advertisements for some sort of IBM social engineering pep talk about hiring employees. FFS, Slashdot. Now I don't feel the slightest inclination to watch this stupid video. Too bad I already gave them the ad view on their stupid un-skippable advertisement video.
And they wonder why we rebel and bypass their artificial restrictions? One ad would have been enough, thank you, but they just had to push it.
By entrepreneurs eager to cash-in on wealthy school districts and the helicopter parents.
It's funny what kind of useless nonsense get's funded when people have free reign to spend other peoples' money.
capitalism = you get what you pay teachers
Lol, you think you have capitalism. It's no wonder that kids come out of public school in america the way they do. I hope you stick to your subject, instead of imparting your biased political and economic views on impressionable young minds. If that's not the case then shame on you.
Automation generally replaces many low paid jobs with fewer high paid jobs, saving the company a small percentage in the process. The people who "lose their jobs" then go on to other jobs, often after investing in some more training to be able to make themselves more valuable.
Don't come here with your fancy shmancy logic and reason regarding this topic. They tuk ur jewbs!!!
On a more serious note. People don't see things this way, they see it as someone losing their job, period. I guess it's a general lack of seeing the big picture, but for some that's a sad reality of life, they're stuck dealing with day to day.
Personally, I feel if someone loses their job, and can't find work due to automation they should get together with a few other people in the same situation. Give them a free ticket to the middle of nowhere, air drop some resources, and let them start a new city. Sometimes, a fresh and brutal new start can give people opportunities they never could get in the city. Also, it'll give those with motivation a chance to make it big in the new city. </hopeful_pipe_dream>
The answer is to distribute the benefits of automation. If your factory has 1000 workers each doing 40 hours a week, and automation makes 250 of those human jobs unnecessary, instead of laying off 250 people altogether while keeping the remaining 750 on a 40 hour schedule
And why would an employer be willing to put forth his or his company's capital into automation investment if only the workers reap the benefit? That's just silly, and no one would go for it.
Really, the harder you squeeze, the more sneaky, ruthless and cunning people will be to keep THEIR money. No matter how good people are, if they feel you are taking money from them that they feel they rightfully earned, they will not like it. It's not about good, or bad. It's about fairness, and the owner will feel it unfair to redistribute his wealth just as much as the lowly worker will feel it unfair that the employer has all that capital saved up and is thus able to make more money.
The government mandates they do unprofitable routes. The cost to do those routes comes from somewhere, and it comes from profits made on cheap routes. If it was a free enterprise company, it wouldn't be compelled by law to do such a thing. If it wasn't compelled by law to do those routes, and still ended up charging me lots for low cost routes, then I would be switching over to a competitor.
I never willingly paid for them to service long-distance, unprofitable routes. Just because I use their service, doesn't mean I should be subsidizing those that use the service a whole lot more than I do, by paying the same rates as them.
How do I compete with the mass market pricing of the Telco or cable service?
The assumption is that eventually the price to roll/run your own will be equal to or less than the ISP's. Bear in mind, that the price of using the ISP is not just the monetary cost. There are other costs involved, and they should be taken into account when making the comparison. More than likely, the ISP can undercut you due to economies of scale, and large contracts with other entities, so the other costs become very important to consider.
No one said it would be easy to vote with your wallet. It is sometimes very hard, made even more difficult in scenarios such as these due to barriers of entry raised by government regulations that were intended to force large ISP entities to play nice.
Call me weird, but your story reminds me a whole lot of this talk of gun registration and the subsequent disarming of the public that so many call for. Bullies play by their rules, and you're stuck with gimped rules to defend yourself with against them. Leaving you only one recourse, to cry for help. But what happens when no one comes which is so often the case?
You do. It usually happens in early November, when you choose which people you will send to DC to represent your interests.
Aww, isn't that cute. You actually think that holding elections every X years somehow gives you sanction to impose your collective will over me? Think again. You can't even morally reconcile the inherent and violent nature at the heart of a democratic system. Mob rule is the real name. And yes, 51% does count as mob rule.
That's all fine and dandy from a practical perspective. But you're still not giving people the choice, and the only arguments you can come up with for that is either "you've already used it thus you should pay for your use of it, no matter what", or "there is no way to determine that you used it thus everyone, including you, has to pay for it."
If you had given me the choice in the first place, then we wouldn't be in this mess, now would we?
Oh yes, the old "la la la la, plug my ears with my thumbs la la la" response. Typical statist denial.
I wish I could copy-paste your response to almost every single one of the people participating in this thread that claim the inverse is true. That the public mail delivery service is somehow mandated to do unfavorable routes, whereas the public mail services only cherry-pick the routes/destinations that are profitable.
something society has agreed to collectively spend money on.
Woah, hold on there, buddy. What is this thing you call "society", and am I not part of it? Is it some sort of entity that magically has my consent to agree to things on my behalf? Or is it something of a convenient construct that is used by the majority to bully everyone into paying for the things that the majority deems worthy of funding?
You speak as if we all had "consensus" to spend money on certain things. We did not, and it is simply immoral and convenient for you and your ilk to ignore the will of those that don't wish to pay for such things. And I will freely continue to bitch about public projects "losing money" because it is not theirs to lose in the first place.
I can mail a letter from Key West, Florida to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska for 46 cents - that doesn't even cover the fuel required. FedEx and UPS don't directly deliver to areas of the country where it's not cost-effective to do so.
And who exactly do you think is paying for you to send that letter across such a distance, and as you almost say, at a loss? That's right, the people that aren't using the service. I personally feel no obligation to provide payment for something only someone else gets to use. If the state doesn't give people a choice in the matter, then it is nothing more than a majority-sanctioned bully at best, and thief/murderer/kidnapper at worst.
. Amtrak in the US has to run very unprofitable long-distance rail service and subsidize it by using the money it makes from its Northeast and California rail services.
You seem to talk about money as if it magically grows on trees, or comes out of ponies' asses. It does not, and you as the consumer are paying for it one way or another.
The other thing to consider is employment. Especially now, given the fact that suitable jobs for the majority of the population are going away with no replacement work on the horizon, we need to find something for people to do.
"You" need to do nothing of the sort. You need to bud out of peoples' lives, and deal with your own. Just because you have the brain capacity and job security padding to boot, doesn't mean you should be coming up with any theories as to how the unfortunate rest of society will survive in the supposedly impending "jobs" crisis. They'll make do, without your intervention or care. Attitudes like yours are precisely why unskilled people of today are out of jobs. They are told that it's okay and that government will "create" jobs for them, if only they vote for the better off people to pay for public works projects.
"There are few talents more richly rewarded with both wealth and power, in countries around the world, than the ability to convince backward people that their problems are caused by other people who are more advanced." - Thomas Sowell
Then explain to me how Train prices continue to rise, while we are "still pouring huge amounts of money into them as taxpayers" ?
To answer your obviously trollish comment/question. The reason that the prices are going up is because the private entites have a pseudo-monopoly in the market. One that is granted to them by government regulations. If you don't believe me, just go ahead and try to get a license to build a railway line? Or a licence to carry passengers? Don't know where to get them? Oh, guess you'll need a government-licensed lawyer to tell you all the regulations and draw up all the paper work.
If there was money to be made from it, then the private sector would be coming in droves. The fact that they don't is very telling. Perhaps there isn't any money to be made in delivering mail? Perhaps the populace is unwilling to spend more on their mail to actually make it profitable for the company to deliver? Perhaps it was running at a loss up until now, hidden by taxation. Or perhaps the private sector _wants_ to come in and make a profit, thinks it can make a profit, but there is something holding it back. Oh I dunno, perhaps some sort of government regulation? Yeah, that's probably it. Privatization means diddly, and is probably just going to make a few execs rich. The real problem is the regulation that is hiding behind the curtain, and it is preventing both privatization and free-market entities from starting up.
If you take my wording literally, sure. That's my bad for not clarifying it, but I wanted my comment to be succint.
Freedom doesn't mean you should be allowed to murder who you want because that would infringe on their freedom. Rather, their freedom to own their property, of which their body is the principal/base component.
For a concrete example, consider farmer Bob deciding whether to sell his corn to Archer Daniels Midland for $4.75 per bushel. Look at his options: - Sell at the offered price. - Not sell at all. That will probably cause him to lose his farm, because without this sale, he doesn't pay off the bank. - Try to sell to someone else. But since there's no one besides ADM who buys corn in his area, the only way Bob could pull this off is to invent his own transport and distribution network, from scratch. So what you have is not a free market, but a ADM-controlled market that is only free to ADM.
Wait, what? Please don't make contrived little examples to prove your point, without explaining the context from which they arise. Are you seriously telling us that some random guy called "Bob" decides to buy a giant/large farm in the middle of an area where his only potential customer would be "Archer Daniels Midland"?? Really? That is the single best concrete example you could come up with to prove your impression of libertarianism? You don't think that maybe Bob is an idiot for making a really really REALLY bad business investment?
How about another example. "Jack" the builder decides to open up a construction business. He invests capital and buys equipment, and he chooses the base of operations for his new business to be in the middle of the fucking Sahara desert. His only options are:
- Not sell at all.
- Hope to holy $DEITY that someone decides to want a building in the middle of the fucking Sahara desert.
Good, okay. Now that we have the silly concept of stupid examples to prove our point out of the way. What you describe may be a free market, but it's a free market where Bob and Jack are both free to be as stupid as they like in their business investments/decisions. I bid you farewell, statist.
The problem is that the company has an army of very good lawyers who can afford to drag the case through the courts for a decade while you go bankrupt.
That's a purely statist construct. The playing field has already been skewed in favor of corporations by virtue of the system your government has installed and fostered.
In fact, that's CURRENTLY a failing on the part of government and the current justice process. You go ahead and try suing a corporation for such damages, and see how far that gets you. They'll respond and probably win with "we were performing within government-declared and mandated safety regulations in our operating environment", or some other lawyer-speak. You think you need lots of funding and lawyers to sue a giant corporation for damages? Let us know how many lawyers and how much funding you'll need to prove that that regulation wasn't enough for your kid in order to change it in the law books. Hint, it's way beyond your budget, buddy.