I put the scare quotes around "free market" because the usual selective Adam Smith quote is used to support no regulation (selectively) for the benefit of corporations, usually a certain corporation or group of corporations.
Um, right. AFAICT Adam Smith was a principled free market thinker (the quote above only confirms it in my view), as opposed to the ones who only claim to be free-marketeers. I think you always have to distinguish between the actual free-market ideas vs the self-motivated people selectively using "free-market" buzzphrases for their own ends, where "free-market" can be substituted with almost any ideology you can think of. I felt the comment I was replying to conflated the two.
