You want me to make my case for “anti-trust laws” as administered by the ACCC or similar but with more power and resources. I thought I touched on a couple of good examples where this should work in a properly regulated system (ours is very weak) and you have rejected them as “handouts”.
Without any “anti-trust Laws” ADM would have been able to buy Graincorp unconditionally and if they chose to just shut down the silos and ports it would leave a lot of graingrowers high and dry.
You would not have any objection to any buyer having “Cubby Station” and using and polluting unlimited amounts of water even if it meant those downstream went without or found the water mfit for purpose.
I could go on but it is pointless.
What you are proposing is that the biggest bullies do what they like and the peasants have to bear the load which is pretty much how it is anyway with not quite enough sweeteners to keep our next generation of farmers, the keepers of intergenerational knowledge, farming.
In the absence of any other method to keep food producers producing, almost every other Western country has resorted to “handouts” to ensure that they do.
You claim to have refuted many of Ben’s arguments in your first two posts. In many cases it is simply your opinion and it is wrong.

“We are all using economic theory because without it, the facts, the data, of themselves, would just be billions of one-off transactions. We're all using theory, because the data cannot be interpreted without it” Jardine K Jardine.

Jardine, that is exactly what the free market is "billions of one-off transactions". If you are going to allow a totally free market you have no need at all to examine or interpret data. The market exists and without any intention to set policies you have no need to know what is happening .

Hmm. Lots of ad hom, appeal to absent authority, non sequitur, misrepresentation, and circular argument.

But notice you didn't answer the questions that prove you wrong? Go ahead: Please define market failures without including necessary and beneficial activities, and justify your assumption that government can do better without using a double standard? Either answer the questions, or admit you can't.

In case you're thinking you did that in your last post, you didn't, because you used a double standard. You (wrongly) assumed that government creates benefits for society by threatening to attack innocent people - "policy" - while (rightly) identifying that as anti-social behaviour when anyone else does it.

"What you are proposing is that the biggest bullies do what they like and the peasants have to bear the load ..."

No, that's what you're proposing. I'm proposing that transactions should be based on consent, and mutual benefit. You're proposing that they should be based on the strongest and most aggressive party - with a legal monopoly of unilateral aggression and fraud - physically attacking innocent people to steal their property, or threatening to. And their victims have no rights but just to bear it. And when I ask you to prove the reasons you give, you evade answering, personalise the argument, and just give me a welter of fallacies, prejudice and hysteria.

The reason you can't answer any of my questions is because you're wrong and you know you're wrong, you stand for arbitrary power without limit or reason, you are COMPLETELY UNABLE to explain what limits on government power you envisage, and you support totalilitarian fascism, which i have correctly identified and you have been completely unable to disprove.

"I'm proposing that transactions should be based on consent, and mutual benefit."
Dream on.

just got in from work, and you blokes are still at it, your right campaigner and Jardine is wrong...that's the end of it...

Thanks Nev

Campaigner

What you obviously haven’t understood is that the issue *all along* has been whether you stand for an open-ended power for the most aggressive party in society to get whatever they want by attacking, threatening and looting the weaker, without legal limit.

That’s why I asked, and you (and Nev) were unable to answer, by what rational criterion do you distinguish
• private property rights that are to protected from forcible governmental override or confiscation, from those that aren’t?
• legitimate from illegitimate governmental decision-making on resources?

By asking these questions, I offered you all you needed to prove my argument completely wrong, if you could: - (unlike you, I don’t flee disproofs, I actively seek them).

The fact that you didn’t answer my questions, is because you can’t, because you stand for NOTHING BUT the principle that what you call the “peasantry” – the subject productive class - can be forcibly overridden and looted at will, by the most powerful and aggressive party in society – the State. Otherwise what're your answers?

>"I'm proposing that transactions should be based on consent, and mutual benefit."
>>Dream on.

Here you openly ridicule the value of protecting the productive from being plundered by their political overlords, mocking your own last desperate pathetic line of defence against my argument. Pathetic because you IGNORED that force and fraud are illegal in market transactions; that government is a force-based monopoly of force; and that the voter has no legal remedy whatsoever against politicians for misleading representations, so it’s a monopoly of fraud.

Thus you have failed to deal with any of the issues of economics, ethics, or politics without floundering in self-contradiction at every step. Worse, even after they are pointed out to you, your argument degenerates straightaway into ad hominem and even more self-contradiction and invincible ignorance.

Thanks for such an open display of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of national socialism and its fake economics. You and Nev can always dream of the utopia you could achieve with total government power, free from all those pesky individual and economic freedoms you despise.