that, say, there is a popular brand of cheese that is widely used in pizzas. One pizza chain that has a monopoly in some areas is having a price dispute with the cheese company. If the cheese company is able to track anybody who uses that pizzeria, is it “free market” for the cheese company to tell other pizzerias that they will be cut off if they sell any pizza to those customers?

On the Internet, this sort of thing is not only possible, it has happened. It is what took place in the Fox/Cablevision dispute. Where I live, my choice for high-speed Internet is Cablevision. Period. I can get DSL, but it is slow by DSL standards (1.33 Mbps download, .33 Mbps upload). I need to be able to upload large files to make a living, and it takes 2 hours to upload a 5 minute video, and that’s if there are no service outages. While I dislike a number of features of Cablevision (being on a LAN with neighbors, their secret limits where they will cut off your service without warning if you exceed them, TOS which prevent loading most servers onto your PC, and their salespeople tell you to just ignore), it is my only choice. Which means that, under a deregulated system (where Cablevision is allowed to make deals giving them a monopoly), if I want high speed Internet service, I have to swear fealty to Cablevision, which makes m a target for anybody with a dispute with Cablevision.

Anarchy, in civilized societies, has historically led to systems akin to feudalism. And economic anarchy leads to economic feudalism.

There is a middle ground between anarchy and micromanagement. To give an extreme example to falsify the argument for complete deregulation, if a deranged person goes around selling food laden with cyanide, the customers killed do not have the option of switching to another provider, and without courts, the only disincentive the individual gets is going out of business. For a free market to work properly, there must be free entry and exit from the system. If individual members get sufficiently large to be able to block people from entering or exiting the system, then the economy is no longer free, and no longer works. Government regulation that is necessary and sufficient to ensure a free market is necessary.

That the U.S. Government has gone far beyond what is necessary, to the point of preventing free markets, is obvious. But this does not mean that it should abdicate its responsibility to the hands of private companies, many of which are supported by slave labor and foreign governments.

In terms of the Internet, we have massive companies like Huffington Post/AOL already trying to use their massive size to close down local non-liberal news providers. But at least they are doing it through market forces, and not yet combining with Internet providers to block access to sites like, say, restate.com.

I realize that it’s much more fun to pretend that I said something that I didn’t, but what part of “That the U.S. Government has gone far beyond what is necessary, to the point of preventing free markets, is obvious.” did you not understand?

I am also aware that a 100% free market is physically impossible, and that pretending that the government is the only possible limiting factor to a free market is idiocy.

Check out, for example, Adam Smith’s THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, Book 5: http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/adam-smith/Wealth-Nations.pdf

…are you taking the position that there should be absolutely no regulation of business? That contract law should not be enforceable except by market forces? That people should be allowed to cheat customers, and the only consequence is that they don’t get new customers? And that any other position is advocating a nanny state?