Most American small towns lean libertarian and espouse rugged individualism - wouldn't they have just opened a competing business with competitive prices instead? Or did they forget how?
It seems like you’re making the same faulty assumption that a lot of libertarians do, which is assuming that just because that is possible and perhaps even economically incentivized, it will happen automatically and immediately to meet demand. Libertarian analysis often just ignores the longer scale passage of time and that institutions - even small businesses, a kind of local institution - take time and human effort to create and maintain.
It all discards way too much of the real world complexity to human systems. Analyzing economic systems in only short (quarter/year) time scales without looking at how one quarter or year affects the ones around it is a massive assumption that I don’t think most people generally have nearly enough respect for.
> It seems like you’re making the same faulty assumption that a lot of libertarians do, which is assuming that just because that is possible and perhaps even economically incentivized, it will happen automatically and immediately to meet demand.
I don’t think the person you’re replying to actually believes that—they’re speaking ironically.