OUR unemployment rate

[Tiberius]

I covered that. A monopoly means that they are the exclusive owners of a product in a market, and even if the were no longer a monopoly (by your creating a company that also sells water), they would be easily capable of bankrupting you in any number of ways (many of them legal, such as buying out all of your stock and making themselves the owners of "your" company). Also, how are you going to get the water to make this company... especially when the monopoly has already employs those who collect the water to be sold themselves?

You didn't cover that. You say that monopolies are exclusive owners of a product in a market; I'm fine with that. My point was that there is nothing stopping another person from coming along and selling the same product (or similar product) on the market either...at least no in free market capitalism.

I already addressed the issue of buyouts. If you suspect a monopoly company might attempt a buyout, don't float your market on the stock exchange...at least not until you can actually get some good supportive investors.

How are we going to get the water? Do you really need to ask that? It rains; there are oceans, rivers, lakes. Use your head.

It doesn't matter if people complain. There is absolutely nothing that can be done (outside of government action) to compete for (perhaps not even obtain and/or sell) the resource that a monopoly is based around.

If I am a business owner, and my entire business depends on the satisfaction of my consumers, then complaints (when taken en-masse) are very important to the stability of my company. If one month, 10% of my consumers send in complaints, it's 10% of my profit that might suddenly switch to a new company that forms. My point was that monopolies can exist, but not indefinitely. It takes only one other company to be set up in order for the monopoly to cease to exist (as a monopoly). No business owner in their right mind would act as if they will have a monopoly forever, and thus complaints must be taken seriously. 10% complaining could result in 10% loss if a new company emerges that offers a better or cheaper product, and if more and more people go to that new company, advertising by word of mouth will grow, and my profits will decrease even more. It's called competition. I must change my business plan, lose a bit of profit by doing so (but by a significantly lower amount that losing consumers) and increase customer satisfaction.

My example may have been "quaint"... but the disgusting thing is that worse things have happened. Remember the East India Trading Company? The things that Upton Sinclair asserted in The Jungle were for the most part true. Exploitation on a mass scale is what you get with no regulation... just look at the alaskan salmon fishing industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_salmon_fishery . There are damned good reasons why the government should be a part of the market, or at least why the market needs regulations.

According to the Wikipedia article you cited, this was a state (i.e government) based industry in the first place. I've never argued that the market shouldn't have regulations, but these regulations are market-based, not government based. The market will regulate itself through consumer / producer conversation, petition, and supply / demand.

Did I say favoritism? No. I suggested that the company would offer its services to the highest bidder (because they are being paid more by them)... and that any upstart trying to beat the monopoly on this front must firstly have as much or more money than the company with the monopoly.

Yeah...and that's favouritism. That isn't a free market principle. If a company refused to do business with a startup it could be legally challenged, and the startup would win. Of course, it probably wouldn't even get to trial as I doubt in a free market you'd even get this situation. A company wants to maximise its profits; having only one customer isn't exactly doing that.

Or rather, you'd see a lot of those small and new businesses bought out or go bankrupt as they attempt to compete with the industry giant.

I've addressed the fallacy of claiming that they will get bought out. The only way that will happen is if the industry giant sits down with the small company and writes a figure down on a piece of paper. The control of whether the small company accepts or rejects the offer is entirely in the hands of the person in charge of the company, exactly how it should be. You can't "force" anything unless the company floats on the stock market, and I've already said how that isn't necessary for a startup to do.

I a company goes bankrupt, it clearly wasn't producing a good enough product to rival that of the industry giant, and as I stated before, this would be an example of a monopoly working. If you have a product that your competitors cannot make profit on, you clearly have a very high satisfaction rate.

That is imposing government regulations (laws) upon the market. Hence the market is not free. I think I understood the concept of a 'free market' well enough, thank you very much. I do believe that the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferengi or http://www.wowwiki.com/Goblin or other such trade-princes governments are perfect examples of a free market... although the Ferengie actually do have a few "rules".

No; these aren't laws that are imposed on the market, they are laws imposed on people. Laws imposed upon the market (by the government) are ones specific to the market; i.e protectionism. A free market has no laws imposed upon the market by the government; it is "free". This doesn't mean someone can set up a company called "Murder Inc." and think that they can escape the law of the people. I'd challenge you to find one country today where there is a specific law regarding rape imposed on the market only. I highly doubt you'll find one, because there are already existing laws regarding rape that are imposed on the people, who operate the market.

You can visualise this as a kind of chain:

GOVERNMENT (Impose laws on the people)
PEOPLE (Run the market)
MARKET

As I've already said, I don't oppose regulation of the market, as long as it comes naturally to the market. This regulation however, is imposed by the PEOPLE layer of the chain. A real-world example would be the sets of internet standards (that govern HTTP, HTML, etc) which multiple companies have signed up to and pledged to "obey". These standards are written by people, not the government, and are imposed upon all products that use HTTP / HTML (so that includes all browsers).

You ever wonder why Internet Explorer has been getting better at rendering HTML pages in recent years? It's because the W3C came up with standards and browsers like Firefox and Chrome were better at implementing them, resulting in people (consumers) switching from I.E to Firefox / Chrome. Microsoft finally dedicates some of its development to making sure that I.E conforms to standards, in the hopes that it'll get back some of its market share.

Imagine if Microsoft sold I.E as an piece of shareware, and that Mozilla sold Firefox, Google sold Chrome, etc. Nobody regulated the distribution of those pieces of software amongst the users but the users themselves. This is a natural market regulation.

Oh, and if you were wondering, even though I think Windows is a shoddy OS at best, I'm still against the EU pressuring them to put a "choose your browser" screen on the thing. They haven't done the same thing for Mac, or Linux, only Microsoft. Most people will know about alternative browsers from friends, web adverts, articles, etc anyway. I say let people come to Firefox and Chrome by themselves. There is no reason to force Microsoft to advertise their competition.