You miss my point Tom. How do you walk into a CEO's office and say "It is pretty frigging obvious you are not a REAL capitalist enterprise, you are on the fiddle and I'm shutting you down."? How do you constitutionally do that? Without bayonets, or a Minister of Libertarian Enforcement, who can just come in and do it? Especially when what passes for government regulation is non-existent in your universe.

Are you going to wait for the Free Market to do it for you, dreamer? These guys will crush their competition, using all the tools of monopoly and collusion their money can buy. Hell, companies had private armies in the old days. Now they have lawyers, lobbyists and propagandists. They used force against the Indians, and their workers and each other, and overseas they used it against the wogs and fuzzy wuzzies and the entrepreneurs from France and Holland and Spain they competed against. The law was an instrument to keep the poor controlled and to help enforce lawsits and contracts for their benefit. They invented the "Free Market", they tamed it and controlled it for their benefit, do they think they cared about what you or Ayn Rand think? Do you think they could even understand it?

It is true, even big companies sometimes go broke because they can't compete with others; Eastman Kodak comes to mind. But there is no mechanism to guarantee this will happen, any more than there is a guarantee an evil government will be voted out or toppled by insurrection. It is the nature of economic and political power that it gives you the resources to resist natural economic or political corrective forces. It is an innoculation against justice. It's why people want power and money in the first place.

Nobody was a Libertarian in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, no one then would have known what a "Libertarian" was. Ayn Rand would have been a dangerous anarchist to them, and so would you. They were doing what businessmen did, and always had done since the days of the East India Company or the Dutch Republic or the Roman Grain Factors.

This is the point I've tried to make, people with economic power do not care about Libertarian Principles, in fact, to the Robber Barons, it would have looked like something out of the French Revolution. "I am a gentleman of property and this wild-eyed fanatic wants to shut me down because he doesn't like my perfectly legitimate and traditional way of doing business. Who does he think he is?"

Your Libertarian principles are going to have to be advertised, legislated, codified, challenged democratically and legally, thoroughly litigated, and probably changed by that process beyond your recognition. And your ideas will be opposed by men with money, power, friends in high places and a retainer at Pinkerton's. It will be a never-ending process, which is exactly what history is all about. That's why the business environment is different now than it was a century ago, and that environment was different from a century before that.

You talk about post-colonial America as your model, but we were a primitive frontier, one of the few places in the world where common people could own their own land, because there was so much of it and so few of us, and the Indians were conveniently driven off. The only other places like it in the world were in South Africa and Australia. It wasn't economic freedom that built those economies, it was horses, iron and gunpowder.

In Europe, and here a half-century later, a form of capitalism had already taken root that was challenging the landed aristocracies (it manifested itself here as a Civil War, the Industrial and Commercial North against the Agricultural and Feudal South). As Conservatives love to point out, the Civil War wasn't just about slavery, it was a competition betyween different kinds of capitalist organization, each which considered itself the only true source of liberty and freedom.

And just what was living in Colonial America really like for the bulk of the people? You know the winners write the histories. I have a feeling it was no libertarian utopia. One third of the free, white, property-owning males preferred the Crown, one third preferred independence, and one third were opportunists who didn't care, they just wanted to be left alone and to play both ends against the middle.

Your calls to "reduce the power of the state" are just words, you don't go to a guy with power and tell him to reduce. He'll rip your head off. And you don't short-circuit that power by getting rid of the rules. If you abolish the Empire you get feudalism, it has happened over and over again throughout history. You have to do it with laws and votes and legislatures and courts and it will be fought and opposed tooth and nail every step of the way. Economic rights are like political rights, they are not god-granted, or even obvious to everyone, they are fought for, in the street and on the battlefield, in the universities and the pulpits, and later in the courts and legislatures and at the ballot box. The real capitalist is not opposed to the government, or even in cahoots with it, he owns the government. He's going to laugh in your face and have you arrested.

Your ideas are just not workable, any more than the ideas of the Fabian Socialists and 19th century anarchists were workable. Socialism could only be fully implemnented through force, and I suspect it will be the same for your brand of "freedom". Although your ideas may some day contribute to the politico-economic organization of the future, it won't turn out the way you expect. The past is barely remembered and the future is unpredictable, and even if you get exactly what you want now in politics, in a generation it may turn out very different as everyone scrambles to carve up the new pie.

Your revolution will be just like all the others, you will start by dismantling all the institutions you don't like, setting up your own, and crushing everyone who gets in your way. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.