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The free market is people peacefully trading with each other.Then few if any free markets actually exist.
Some traders are indeed "peaceful." The brute fact, though, is that that many market participants actively seek out ways:
A) to inhibit competition, or even prevent it completely, for example by anticompetitive business practices; and/or ...
B) to make the public pick up the tab for costs while keeping revenues for themselves -- think pollution costs and bank bailouts, to name just two examples; and/or ...
[EDIT:] C) in some cases, to flat-out lie, cheat, and steal.
FOOTNOTE: As I understand it, economists refer to B as privatizing profits while socializing costs, a.k.a. "externalities."
These human tendencies to do A, B, and C above appear to be fundamental facts of life. Left unchecked, they can have a corrosive effect on markets.
There's ample room for evidence-based debates about how best to deal with these tendencies. But it doesn't seem to have done much good to insist that free markets are a cure-all -- it's reminiscent of the old economist joke whose punch line is "we'll just assume we have a can opener."
> Most government is coercion. I don't see how more of it is a solution.
It's certainly true that when government regulation is driven by untested ideology, or by private interests, it can make things worse by discouraging private initiative and effort. (Some of the ways market predators try to do A and B above is by encouraging government actors to enact legislation and regulations that favor them.) We've certainly seen that happen at various times in various places.
But governmental regulation, selectively applied, can also be at least a partial solution, to the extent it can help keep market predators from doing A, B, and C above.