[toomuchtodo]

> What is the ethics of those who deny private companies the right to engage in volunteer transactions among people in the market?

You're breaking the law, laws with good reason.

> Secondly, consumerism is possible only in the presence of production, and it cannot exist unless there's a product to consume. Are you questioning the ethics of value-production?

Yes. Must I list human abuse that takes place because of "demand" and "production"? Child labor? Child prostitution? Slavery? Unregulated economics is anarchy.

[ghostwriter]

> Yes. Must I list human abuse that takes place because of "demand" and "production"? Child labor? Child prostitution? Slavery? Unregulated economics is anarchy.

You are mixing together ethics of "producing a value as such" with immoral acts. One person's needs is not a claim on other people's life/time.

Slavery and child abuse is immoral based on exactly the same fundamental principle that makes regulations of volunteer trade in the market immoral - the principle that a human being belongs to oneself (which leads to the right to make decisions and to take choices based on their own reason and their capacity to think reasonably).

As for the child labour, it is not immoral as such - it's just a phenomenon of life that had better be absent in the contemporary society. Absence of it improves the quality of life, yet this quality is neither an inherent trait of life, nor something which is granted to a person upon his/her birth. It's quite the contrary - a human being must work in order to sustain their life and to prosper. It's a law of nature for all humans.

And an unregulated market multiplies opportunities for those who are willing to earn their own living by their work - by producing values and exchanging these values with other people, voluntarily, to a mutual benefit of each party. That's the essence of unregulated economy. And no government can either know beforehand or reasonably regulate or even be on the same page with all the possible volunteer transactions in the market that may benefit all parties. It's impossible because of a continuous technological advancement of humanity, of processes being improved and revisited for efficiency, and of many other aspects of human ingenuity. And that's why people might break laws - especially the laws imposed by government regulations, which are far from being reasonable most of the time.

[shkkmo]

> And an unregulated market multiplies opportunities for those who are willing to earn their own living by their work

I don't think that's true. Unregulated markets can result in a number of situations that limit people's opportunities significantly. Monopolies are a clear example and various externalities can also have significant impacts on commerce. To maximize the opportunities we need carefully tuned regulation. The problem is that our political systems for creating and enforcing that regulation are, shall we say, "a little broken".

[ghostwriter]

> Unregulated markets can result in a number of situations that limit people's opportunities significantly. Monopolies are a clear example and various externalities can also have significant impacts on commerce.

Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly (i.e. a monopoly, that is not associated with government regulations, subsidies, grants, medallions, quotas and other things that have to do with regulating the market by the government), yet is capable of preventing other players from entering the same market?

[shkkmo]

> Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly.

No, because we have regulations to prevent them and break them up.

There are a number of entities that are clearly restraining their classically monopolistic behavior BECAUSE of the regulations such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.