Some good points ghost, and thanks for not taking offense when the author criticizes your views. This gave me pause, because I can see your point. I think I see where your analogy breaks down though. There are no competing interests within your self. You are a unit, an indivisible will or being. The choices you make to achieve your ends are yours alone. If your body is ailing and you take medicine, the outcome is your responsibility. Human civilization on the other hand is made up of many beings, each with their own interests. What one perceives as good, another may perceive as bad. As described in section 2 of the reading, the market is not yet another policy prescription enforced by government, it is the absence of such force. It is the absence of one party imposing their view of good and bad on another. So, the market is not made, it emerges from the multitude of voluntary interactions between individuals. I'm not sure how we disagree here. If the options available to a person are work or starve, why would you take away the work option? If people are voluntarily choosing to work in a factory under terrible conditions, it means the alternatives available to them are even worse. That work is an opportunity for them to better themselves. Child labour regulations only hampered the development and expansion of the industries that were providing these opportunities. Had they been allowed to develop freely, only under the constrains of supply, demand and property rights, they would have had to provide a safe work environment for their employees, if that's what the employees wanted. Let me give you a quick example. Nike and Reebok both have shoe factories in the same city. All of their resources and external conditions are effectively identical. The only thing they can vary is the quality of the work environment for their employees. Nike chooses to spend $1 per man-hour maintaining an improved work environment for its employees, while Reebok keeps that dollar as profit. Reebok will quickly find itself unable to attract the employee base it needs to produce its shoes as Nike takes its employees and market share. So, Reebok, instead of improving the work conditions, simply passes the extra $1 per hour on to their employees. Now we are seeing the market at work. Employees are now faced with the option of a safe work environment, or an extra dollar per hour. Some will choose safety while others will choose the extra pay. And this is exactly what has happened eventually, where now employers do all they can to attract good employees away from their competitors. I have also noticed this tendency. The people who run corporations, heads of state, the person selling you food, you, me and every human being are all fallible and capable of using power to dominate other people. Liberty is not a pill that makes men angels. What it does do is limit the extent to which evil can be expressed in the world. Right now, in any given geographic area, we have a monopoly on many of the most vital social institutions that is maintained through violence. If voluntary organizations consolidate their power and turn on their customers and start stealing from them, putting them in cages, killing them, spying on them and telling them what they can and can't do, well then we're back to where we started, the present day state. But, if I am correct, and the pressure for those firms to compete with one another for our favor leads them to serve us, then we can have freedom and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known. Maybe we can read this essay next, but check out Chaos Theory by Robert Murphy. He speculates how a free market in security services might organize itself, but his most important point is that no one knows ahead of time how an industry will organize. The security industry has been insulated from market conditions for so long and is so out of touch with the needs of its customers, that I suspect it would be unrecognizable after a transition to its optimal form. There are ten thousand questions that we could muse about similar to the one you posed, but the point is that, if we do our best to adhere to the non-aggression principle, then we can quickly move in the right direction without having to know ahead of time exactly how the final form of such an institution would look. This is where the institution of private property and markets really shine. Markets curb unsustainable growth through the price mechanism. As a needed resource is depleted, its supply drops and, assuming constant or rising demand, its price will rise. Rising prices force people to consume LESS of the resource and save more of it. Private property also incentivizes people to maximize the value of it. People tend to preserve and improve their land and capital. Free enterprise and private property, when honored, are an environmentalists dream. These institutions maximize the efficiency with which scarce resources are used to satisfy people's desires, and have natural rationing mechanisms built in to keep people from over consuming. If we ever get into some economic theory in this club, we can talk about the concept of the evenly rotating economy, which really drives the point home how only a free society can ever have a hope at sustainability. I can assure you that I am not willfully ignorant. I have a very open mind and if an argument that can stand up to reason and be shown to accurately describe reality is presented to me, then I would gladly change my mind. My views have been forged by a search for the truth that has lasted my entire adult life and continues to this day. I started this club because I think the pursuit of truth is one of the most noble human endeavors. Debating these issues is critical for us to construct a world-view that is grounded in reason and can guide us forward. Assuming great success for Silk Road, how easily could it become another blood thirsty cartel seeking profit at all costs? We must maintain our integrity and be true to our principles, the opportunity to make a lasting difference is too great not to.