Company Stores and scripts are an abuse of power. Here is what I said about abuses of power ...
" Libertarianism oppose to abuses of power, and only want a government big enough to stop abuses of power. "
No government is big enough to stop all abuses of power. The current one, for example, is failing to stop a new iteration of company script. Then there's domino effect, like the current financial crisis, where a few greedy and disproportionately powerful people or institutions manage to screw the entire economy and everyone who operates in it. So while this is a fine principle, it sadly doesn't really guide us.
The fact that these types of "company towns" operated, with impunity was simply because government was NOT doing its job properly.
Specifically, it merely guaranteed property rights and enforcement of contracts (you know, the libertarian ideal), thus allowing those with more property than average to use the associated power to gather even more, until they had enough to dictate any terms they wanted for the rest. A government that doesn't restrict concentration of economic power cannot stop the majority of people from becoming beholden to the will of those who control the resources.
For the record, my ideal solution for this would be unconditional citizen pay sufficient to live on. Let those who can stand to spend the rest of their life in their beds do so; it's not like they were likely contributing much anyway. And let those institutions who need the whip to get anyone to serve them die off; what were they ever, but soul-crushing slavemasters? We're moving to post-industrial economy and have little if any need for human robots to man the assembly line, so why stick to an economic model designed to make people just that? People enjoy building and accomplishing things, so why not simultaneously encourage that by removing the sting from failure and depotentate economic power as a tool of abuse?
However, I would suggest to you that the Government taxes and fees and whatnot amount to the same " no longer free, and it's just ugly and messy." you complain about in Libertarianism. We are serfs to the Government masters.
How do you propose a government to perform any function, proper or not, without resources? And I have a hard time imagining what way of getting them wouldn't cause far more problems than taxation.
But yes, our societies are still suffering from hierarchical power structures, of having masters and serfs. As far as I can tell, Libertarianism wold make them worse, not better. After all, a government is, at least in theory, beholden to me; a company is not.