[mrj]

Sounds nice but look at the history of business. Laissez faire was attempted and didn't work out so great.

Sometimes there need to be rules and they need to be applied evenly so nobody has an advantage that others don't. If one business has to build wheelchair ramps or close caption while another doesn't, that's an unfair advantage.

You can dislike government all you want, but don't pretend these things we have would magically occur without some kind of intervention.

[thecoffman]

Obviously this isn't the forum to get into an economics debate, so I'll just leave it at this: we have never, ever had true "Laissez faire" free markets. We have always had corporatism/corporate capitalism. There is a very distinct difference between the two. I am arguing in the theoretical "given a truly free market" but we don't have such a thing, and never had, so it truly is theoretical. Given the current situation I largely agree with you - given the right circumstances however, I do think true freedom would work.