Sebastian Lundh

I think you missed my point; the point is that a lot of people DO benefit from the existence of the company, and a lot of people WOULD benefit by investing in it, assuming that enough other people invested too, but the problem is that everyone basically thinks "my action doesn't matter".

First of all, let me clarify: I'm not saying that this supposed problem proves that the state in anyway is superior or better than the free market, but I do think that this might be a problem, and I wonder how a market would solve it. If I have thought about this the wrong way, and if it is really a non-problem, I'd like to know that too, of course. Let's say that we have a free market world. Let's also say that there is a taxi service, that is very iconic; it as associated with the city as much as the Eiffel Tower is associated with Paris. The look of the taxi cabs attracts a lot of people to the city where the taxi service operates, and all the businesses there thrive because of the presence of the taxis. There is however a problem; no one actually travel by taxi, everyone just like the looks of the taxis (kind of like the phone booths in London), so the taxi company wants to apply for bankruptcy, unless the businesses of the city choose to finance the operations of the taxi company. It is in the interest of every single business in town that the taxi company survives, but no one is willing to finance the company. Why? Because in order to survive, at least 50 000 out of 100 000 businesses have to invest 50 dollars in the company (let's, for the sake of simplicity say that no company would profit if it invested more than that), but every company thinks "well, if 49 999 can invest in the company without me help, then 50 000 can invest in the company without my help, and if less than 49 999 invest in the company, there's no point of me investing in the company", so no one invests, and everyone is worse off as a consequence. Am I thinking about this in the right way? What could a market do to solve this problem? /Sebastian

Can't they just avoid that by merging with each other, so that they get all of the control the same resources? Besides, why would a company do that? In today's world everyone can find out what happens all over the world immediately, so it's not like a company can sell anything and keep it a secret, right? Every company has to realize that selling something outside of the cartel will brake it, right? A court? If the court can keep the cartel together, the cartel will be rich, right? And if they will be rich, they can pay the court a lot of money. I acknowledge that I might be wrong, but I just can't see how freedom solves that problem. You might say that we still shouldn't initiate force, and I guess that's true.

Why? Well, they wouldn't starve, because they'd give the food producers all their stuff, right?

Here's my problem; if all food producers, or at least all major food producers, decide to work together, and decide to sign contracts that would make it impossible for anyone to leave the cartel, they would have a lot of power. It takes time to produce food, so new competitors can't just enter the market, and food is something that we really need, so the food producers could very well use that power to make people give away all their stuff to them. Yes, I know that government is the ultimate monopoly, but that doesn't change the fact that this might be a problem, right?

Hello!I have a question about monopolies: Let's say that all food producers in the world work together, and decide to not sell food to anyone unless they decide to give the producers all their present and future wealth; how would the market solve this? Thank you!

Hello! So, I recently bought a book on anarcho-capitalism, called The New Libertarianism: ANARCHO-CAPTALISM by J. Michael Oliver. It's an attempt to reconcile objectivism with anarcho-capitalism, and as such it explains the basics of objectivist metaphysics. I'm at the very beginning of the book, where he talks about the existence axiom, but the problem is that I don't get it. The basic argument is that we are conscious, and if we're conscious there has to be something objective (outside of our minds) that we're conscious of, but is that really true? Can't I be conscious of my own fantasies? Thank you! /Sebastian