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Every business has a dependency at its core. The customer must be dependent on the business in some way, or the customer will not pay, and the business will die.

Sometimes the dependency is easy to spot, sometimes it is hard. It is easy to spot the dependency at the core of the water company's business. People must have water to live. We are all dependent on the local water monopoly for cheap clean water, so we pay them. It may be possible to live without paying them, but water would be so much more difficult to get that we don't bother. It is a very good thing that water companies are highly regulated, or they would charge far more than they do.

It is much harder to spot the dependency at the core of the newspaper business. The public can live quite well without reading newspapers, so it might seem that there is no real dependency. The trick here is to realize that the public is not the customer of the newspaper. The public is the product, something packaged and sold to advertisers. The merchants who advertise in the papers are the papers' real customers. The merchants must pay the papers to print the ads. No payment, no ad. There is the dependency.

Employees often do not realize that they themselves are businesses, being paid for the work they provide, so there must be a dependency here too, and indeed there is. Employees can choose to stop working, or to work elsewhere. The boss seems powerful, but he is utterly dependent on his workers. If they stop working, the business dies. This is why employees get paid.

From a purely practical point of view, the best businesses to invest in are those in control of the strongest dependencies. Luxury restaurants are nice, and you can't eat there unless you pay, but the control of gourmet food is not a compelling force over the public. Selling tobacco, for example, is a much better business, because the product is truly addictive and there are relatively few suppliers.

You can be certain that a business making a lot of money has control over a strong dependency. Oil companies are very profitable because your car does not go unless you pay for gas. Drug companies have large profit margins because you may die if you don't pay for certain drugs. Microsoft is wildly profitable because they spend all their time making sure you cannot read your own data with any other kind of computer. Conversely, to know whether a new business will be highly profitable, you just need to ask whether customers will have a strong dependency on that business alone.

There is a close connection between the power to withhold goods and the power to inflict harm. Governments are interested in getting and maintaining power, so their actions sometimes seem like those of businessmen. A remote region of China was reportedly brought under control when the government filled their wells with concrete and built water pipelines out to the area, in the name of "modernization". The result was that the local people had no choice but to obey the government, or die of thirst.