This is precisely how all "free" markets wind up operating.

An honest company cannot compete successfully against a dishonest one, and dishonest ones will soon learn to cooperate to protect each other from the honest ones, and the free market, and to perpetuate the corruption. Eventually all governments will be suborned and all businesses corrupted. Those who won't play the game may flourish briefly, but they can't last. The financial incentives are simply too powerful for anything else to happen. It is too profitable for it not to happen, period.

People work incessantly to pervert the system because it is profitable. There is no sinister conspiracy; it's just human nature and simple market forces at work. In our society our best minds; in the law, lobbying, marketing, public relations and politics; are attracted to this work because it is so damned profitable--and for the most part, legally risk-free.

Only law, regulation, and criminal prosecution can prevent this from occurring, and then only intermittently and haphazardly. If you really want a free market, market tyrants have to go to prison. RobVg is right, heads need to appear on pikes.

This is why the libertarian program is a sham and a fantasy, if not inherently dangerous; not necessarily because it is intrinsically wrong or evil, but because it is as unworkable and unrealistic as all that do-gooder socialist paradise nonsense college adolescents get seduced with in their sophomore year. It gives us this false sense of security so the bad guys can keep on doing what they do without interference. It simply won't work, but it sounds so easy and so good on paper, doesn't it? "If we could only"(insert your favorite cure-all ideology here), "everything would suddenly be wonderful". You're a grown man, TB, how can you believe that shit?

There are financial forces that make corporate crime inevitable, just as they make organized crime, with which it has much in common, inevitable. They are both immensely profitable, and only partially controllable in a democracy. And you, TB, and your libertarian Randian pals, work tirelessly (and without even getting paid for it!) to bring about some impossible entrepreneurial utopia where the problem will just go away.

Who's being the useful idiot now?