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.
> 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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
Actually, that's pretty much the only one.
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.
What’s this “ton of government-backed regulations” you’re referring to?
> Radical advocates of free markets... always seem to forget the violent nature of humans.
What kind of “radical” are you talking about here? Anarchists?
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.
"Unregulated" would be preferable, I think.
Free market: A market that is free from government interference, prices rising and falling in accordance with supply and demand.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20...
> Does the market a business exists in give you the freedom to not be burgled?
Yes, it gives you that freedom.
> Does it give you the freedom to not have to pay for healthcare for your employees?
Yes, it gives you that freedom.
> Does it provide some level of free training to those employees?
Are horses brown? Depends on the horse. Does that mean “horse” is a “terrible term”? No.
> If you're a fisherman and there's another fisherman does the market ensure that other fisherman won't exhaust the ecosystem?
No, because the lack of property rights in that situation creates a tragedy of the commons.
(Dismissing for now the qyuestion of what goods and services can be effectively delivered via markets, and in what circumstances.)
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.
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...