#4 common sense

#5 common sense

Since there are no regulations, the bartender serves them tainted alcohol. They die.

Many years ago, I was on a message board with this unreconstructed Randian libertarian. I think he might have had some sort of neurological disorder. Every instance of government regulation was wrong and bad in this nut's book. I finally had had enough of his pointless stupidity, and worked on him for about two weeks straight on the subject of restaurant health codes. After running through his standard dodges*, I finally wore him down and got him to admit that yes, having an independent government agency promulgate safe food handling practices and enforce those regulations through on-site inspections was probably preferable to the dining public taking its life in its hands every time they went out to eat.

After I had figuratively beaten that confession out of him, I decided henceforth to just walk away from any libertarian kook I encountered online.

*The standard dodges were: People don't have to go out to eat, it's a choice they freely make; a restaurant that poisons its customers would soon go out of business; nobody would go to a restaurant where people got routinely poisoned, so the free market would shut it down, too bad for anyone who died in the meantime; a restaurateur would not be able to just close one place and open another, because something something free market; people should not depend on government regulations and government inspectors to certify safe handling and preparation of food, they should do it themselves.

and if two land at the same time and collide - too bad.

And it is not just safety issues. Many businesses - they love businesses - benefit from various international agreements that give preferential treatments to their exports or from banning import of competing products.

When enough people get sick and die the consumer will stop buying their product and they will go out of business. Naturally, the self-correcting market way. Just as god intended.

Doing the right thing cuts into profits.

Cheating is very inexpensive.