(October 11, 2011 at 6:27 pm)5thHorseman Wrote: Surely with the big companies crushing the smaller ones, they then become a monopoly and dictate the markets. The customer becomes less important because they can only get the goods from the company that dominates, creating a non competitive market with potentially a nasty business charging what they want because of no competition(I realize this is an extremity). Also employee rights, would they go out the window with deregulation?You forget the consumer in all of this. Consumers control the market; the "99%" control the market, they just don't realise it. In a completely consumer based society (which is what right-Libertarians advocate), all corporations must eventually answer to their consumers.
A monopoly could exist, but it would only be strong for as long as it kept it's consumers happy. Imagine, for instance, that there was no Mac OS X, no Linux, no Solaris or UNIX. Imagine there was only Microsoft and their Windows platform. Pretty soon, people would get sick of it, and start to come up with their own ideas; get funding, and start some of the aforementioned products as direct competition. It's already happened to some degree; Microsoft used to be a monopoly, but they are quickly losing a lot of their market share to Apple, and certainly to Red Hat in the business world (if you didn't already know, Red Hat Linux is a Linux distro which charges for licenses / support).
As for employee rights, I assume you mean the whole myth about "corporate slaves". In Libertarianism, the government still exists to enforce the law, and one law I am very much in favour in is against people (or corporations) owning slaves. Just because there would be no government regulation of business, doesn't mean that businesses get to break other non-commercial laws. Social laws are above all other laws; no business can get away with murder, or rape, or slavery. Employees have the right to quit if they want, or organise mass walkouts, or any other social action. Consumers can do the same, because consumers have shown time and time again to care about working conditions of companies they buy from.
