<i>&gt; Regulation by free market participants? Is that a joke?</i><p>No. I&#x27;m using &quot;regulation&quot; in a more general sense here, to mean &quot;giving market participants incentives to behave in particular ways, and not to behave in other ways&quot;. That&#x27;s what&#x27;s really important. And every time you buy or sell something, or refuse to buy or sell something, you are contributing to the incentives of other market participants. Government regulation isn&#x27;t magic; it&#x27;s just another way of affecting incentives.<p><i>&gt; Free markets do not self regulate</i><p>You are incorrect. To take just the most obvious example, prices in a free market are regulated by supply and demand. That is &quot;self regulation&quot;, as opposed to, say, prices being regulated by government dictates.<p><i>&gt; in your ideal world, would you do a microbial test on every milk carton you buy?</i><p>I think you need to spend some time actually looking at the models that libertarian economists have put together to show how a world without government regulation would work. I suggest David Friedman&#x27;s <i>The Machinery of Freedom</i> for a start.<p>Just as a brief response, you are making an underlying assumption that the only thing stopping, for example, milk suppliers from leaving harmful microbes in milk is government regulation. Do you have any support for that assumption?<p><i>&gt; Governments are elected and as such they represent the people and the peoples will, thus any terms added by the government are in fact terms added by those participating in the transaction.</i><p>I can see we&#x27;re just going to have to disagree here. Your definition of &quot;voluntary&quot; simply makes no sense to me. Nor is it the definition actually used in economics, where it is generally considered obvious that government regulations are involuntary with respect to individual market transactions.<p><i>&gt; when I buy milk, one of my terms is that it should have microbial content below dangerous levels as stated in the regulation related to microbial content of the milk.</i><p>But suppose I disagree with you about what a &quot;safe&quot; microbial content is. I have no option to buy milk with different levels. So even if this particular transaction is &quot;voluntary&quot; for you, because the regulations just happen to match your preferences, that doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s voluntary for others who have different preferences.<p>If you object that no reasonable person would have different preferences for microbial content in milk, I suggest that you spend some time looking into the disputes over whether pasteurization actually removes beneficial microbes (and nutrients) from milk. It is by no means the slam dunk that you appear to think it is.<p><i>&gt; I suggest reading about working conditions and child labor during the industrial revolution.</i><p>I already have. And one of the things I read was that the industrial companies who imposed those conditions had government monopolies; they weren&#x27;t competing in a free market. That&#x27;s why they were able to exploit workers and children.<p><i>&gt; Before slavery, slavery was illegal?</i><p>You&#x27;re not reading very carefully. Slavery was legal, because governments legitimized it; there was never a time when it was illegal (prior to it being outlawed in most of the developed world over the past century or two). But it wasn&#x27;t voluntary for the slaves, so you can&#x27;t use slavery as an example of a free market having &quot;awful&quot; effects.<p><i>&gt; as opposed to the slaves who voluntarily agree to be slaves?</i><p>Can you give any examples of slaves who voluntarily agreed to be enslaved? I&#x27;m not aware of any; the closest thing would be indentured servants, but they were only indentured for a specified period of time, and there were limits on what they could be required to do as part of their servitude. No such limits existed for slaves.