"Free Market" is a terrible term, the freedom of the market needs to be defined. Does the market a business exists in give you the freedom to not be burgled? Does it give you the freedom to not have to pay for healthcare for your employees? Does it provide some level of free training to those employees? If you're a fisherman and there's another fisherman does the market ensure that other fisherman won't exhaust the ecosystem?
At this point I think "free market" is mostly a term of propaganda. It's too loose and wide-ranging to be useful for productive discussion, and meanwhile "free" is always good, right, so who would want a non free market? Monsters, surely.
No, it is an economics term describing a type of market, as an opposution to regulated one, as often sugar industry is, for example.
Maybe you mean the fact that there are regulations and therefore no one has a free market? If that's so - c'mon, let's be a bit reasonable. It's as if you were saying that people are not free, cause they cannot do everything they want.
As someone else wrote here, the role of the government is to make sure that everything is working to benefit the society, and definitely to protect the people.
Free market without any regulations will work as long as people are simply decent. But we are human, poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king etc. So some regulations are needed. But not so many of the lobbied ones, as the corporate interests should not be the primary concern of the government. IMHO etc.
> > At this point I think "free market" is mostly a term of propaganda.
> No, it is an economics term describing a type of market.
It's both; it's an economics term describing an idealized abstraction which does not (and arguably cannot) exist in the real world, and a propaganda term applied to real markets which, without exception, diverge radically from the idealized abstraction.
Markets as we know them are products of regulation. That's why "free market" is such a useless term. It can mean anything one likes, including "no" regulation (for certain values of "no"—now let's have fun figuring out what that means). It can mean markets regulated to make them "more free"—greater information transparency and standardization, for example. Depends entirely on your perspective.
"Regulation" is another term that's been abused to the point of meaninglessness, for that matter. It's largely just a synonym for "thing I don't like" now.
[EDIT] it's a bit like "right", which is mostly a term of propaganda, too. Declaring something's a right is propaganda. Declaring something's definitely not a right is propaganda. It may be useful in that role, but it's not especially useful in deciding policy. And yes I'm familiar with from-first-principles attempts to distinguish "natural" rights from everything else. I've even read the Second Treatise. It's all just-so stories, not some law of reality.
Free market typically means a market in a system where the government provides some guarantee of protection over fundamental negative rights to (for example) life, liberty and property. In that frameworks the answer to your questions:
> Does the market a business exists in give you the freedom to not be burgled
Yes, to an extent, freedom of property guarantees that anyone who burgles you will be punished
> Does it give you the freedom to not have to pay for healthcare for your employees
Yes. In a free market, there is no employee. Employees are simply one-man/woman businesses that you exchange money for in exchange for labor or time or a task (in the case of salaried employees). There is no reason why someone paying a business should have to explicitly pay for that business's healthcare. The employed business, even if a single person, should charge enough to pay for their health insurance.
> Does it provide some level of free training to those employees?
No. Nowhere in a negative right to life, liberty, or property is there a promise of free education.
> If you're a fisherman and there's another fisherman does the market ensure that other fisherman won't exhaust the ecosystem?
No, the ecosystem exists independent of the market (it preceded it), and there is again no right to ecosystem partitioning in the right to life, liberty, and property.
That is just one definition though, the "free market" that America has right now reads as "Yes, No, Yes, Yes" in particular though I'd disagree with the last point - a fair free market would incorporate things that tend to be cost externalities into the true costs of goods - leveling a mountain to mine coal or fishing a bank to extinction are costs that society cares about and are things that should be incorporated into the cost.
To reinforce the point a bit - if, for instance, over fishing is unpunished, regulated or otherwise incorporated into costs then failing to over fish will result in a competitive disadvantage that the market will punish. In this case acting in a way that ensures a long term benefit to society is being actively punished by society's rules - and the system is illogical.
To simply exist, free markets require a ton of government-backed regulations, the most obvious one being the right to private property.
There's this dichotomy between the Good free markets and the Bad big government. They're actually two sides of the same coin : they need each other to exist.
Radical advocates of free markets (and anarchists) always seem to forget the violent nature of humans.
Realistically, if you stop there you're gonna have information asymmetry problems so damaging that if you don't fix them the torches and pitchforks will come out.
> Radical advocates of free markets (and anarchists) always seem to forget the violent nature of humans.
Radical advocates of free markets are often libertarian, and they rarely forget the violent nature of humans, which is why libertarians explicitly call for the existence of a government, limited in scope to defending a few enumerated rights, such as private property.
Economists generally don't use the term "free markets". They describe different kinds of market: purely competitive, purely monopolistic, monopolistic-competitive and oligopolistic. Each of these markets show different quite characteristics, even though each is "free" insofar as the participants make their own decisions as they see fit.
In theory the perfectly competitive market is most effective at maximising net utility for all participants. But in general, very few markets are close to that end of the spectrum. Most fall somewhere in the other categories.
Purely competitive, purely monopolistic, monopolistic-competitive, and oligopolistic are terms to describe how a market behaves, not the regulatory environment the market exists within. A "free market" is a regulatory environment and not a market behavior.
If such conditions change the price of labour, for example, they are by definition an interference with price mechanisms. The magnitude of the interference will depend on the magnitude of this change. For example, setting a price floor for labour at $0.03/hr will have a smaller effect than setting that price floor at $30/hr.
A free market is one in which, once uniform or standard rules or requirements are established, price and quantity are determined by market mechanisms, rather than by some central planning mechanism.
Even within a so-called free market, numerous market failures may exist: externalities, imperfect or asymmetric information, monopoly/monopsony, coercion, power imbalances, fraud and misrepresentation, rent-seeking and rents, public goods, principle-agent problems, capital concentration, systemic risk, capture and corruption, Gresham's Law dynamics, unpriced ecological inputs, and numerous parties unable to participate in wholly market-based transactions, among them.
Establishing a minimum wage, or employer of last resort, addresses a well-known conflict in the tendencies of the prices of wages and rents -- see Smith and Ricardo.
What you're describing is neither free market nor even remotely viable.
> A free market is one in which, once uniform or standard rules or requirements are established
This is not correct. A free market is a market that is free from government interference. Such rules or requirements can constitute government interference. Ergo, they can fail to yield a free market.
To see the absurdity of the claim that "uniform or standard rules or requirements" always yield a free market, consider the "uniform rule" given by the price floor I described above.
> Even within a so-called free market, numerous market failures may exist
This is irrelevant to a discussion about whether the term "free market" is meaningful. It's moving the goalposts.
> coercion, fraud and misrepresentation, capital concentration, systemic risk, capture and corruption, numerous parties unable to participate in wholly market-based transactions (?)
These are not "market failures", and many of the failures you described are really the same (Gresham's Law and information asymmetry). That aside, one must take into account whether the alternatives are worse: in other words, government failure. For example, on your point about "rent-seeking and rents":
Alexander Hamilton of the World Bank Institute argued in 2013 that rent extraction positively correlates with government size even in stable democracies with high income, robust rule of law mechanisms, transparency, and media freedom. [1]
> What you're describing
What am I describing?
[1] Small Is Beautiful, at Least in High-Income Democracies: The Distribution of Policy-Making Responsibility, Electoral Accountability, and Incentives for Rent Extraction. Alexander Hamilton. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/195551468332410332...
