Conversely, a free market is free for monopolies to form; is free to charge whatever they want; is free to block other companies from entering and selling to a company via any means short of bribery (although even that could be thought of as free); is free to to do anything when competing short of breaking the law.
We do not live in a free society, we are not free to do whatever we want; for example, I don't think anyone says we should be 'free' to murder anyone we want.
I think the GP is more accurate with fair. I'd actually say, it's a guaranteed to be 'open market' we want; meaning everyone must play by the same rules. Of course the challenge is that whoever sets the rules, will end up protecting their own interests, and then we end up where we are anyway. Maybe we can turn to AI to be absolutely fair in creating rules to establish open markets... and then AI becomes the pure benevolent dictator, except for that pesky off by one error I left lurking in the code :/
But what guarantees this freedom? And as I understand it, it doesn't prevent monopolies from forming, it is meant to restrict monopolies from controlling the market.
"... are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority."
The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but that implies that the government is intervening in the market. All I was pointing out is that there is no perfect system where politics, monopolies and private interests won't compete to control the market.
That's up to the society which wants to have a free market. For instance, anti-trust laws is one way of doing it.
> The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but that implies that the government is intervening in the market.
Someone should to step in here, whether it's government or not, is another question. But clearly, if market has no way of preventing a monopoly, it's not really free.
That is nonsense. There are plenty of natural monopolies [1], where competitors are free to enter the market but simple can't compete. E.g. if there are economies of scale (e.g. Google search engine) or network effects (e.g. Facebook).
> One view is that a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
That's how I define it. Monopoly makes the market non free.
Nonsense. Free market means the ideal market of whatever one's personal ideology thinks will work best. It's the economic version of "a perfect world", and everyone has a different vision of what "a perfect world" even means.
Free market, which btw has grown to become a economical and political buzzword, is not "the ideal market of whatever one's personal ideology thinks will work best"; The core ideology behind it was to let the buyer and seller work on what works for them and keep third party interference to the least.
Fair market imply either party is made aware of all the details behind the trade in case of which price discovery is impossible as the buyers won't buy above real value and sellers won't sell below real value. Anti-trust and Anti-monopoly laws that are sub-points of a fair market are inherently against the ideal free market.
Also, theory does not really work in practice and no market is entirely free or fair.
