> we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poiso

> we've bought into the free market philosophy so far that we don't have a civic language for saying "It's not OK that the railroad company management has poisoned an entire town because it helped their bottom line" or "the incinerator company that's also trying to poison an entire town is not within its rights to do so." If a private entity can unilaterally impose itself upon another, that's the opposite of a free market, or at least of a free market that has any respect for property rights. Instead, what you're seeing is a corporatist system, in which the regulatory machinery has been co-opted by private interests - which is exactly what we'd expect to happen in a democracy. See "regulatory capture". If this were truly a free market, then when those Ohio residents had their property rights imposed upon, they'd be able to recover the full costs of those impositions through the legal system. The fact that the residents aren't able to do so doesn't reveal a problem with markets. It shows that the government isn't protecting the people's property rights, either due to failures in the legal system, or through a regulatory scheme that's been perverted to protect the corporations rather than the rest of us. In short, point the finger at your leaders.