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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

> the supposed „free market“ country

Good scare quotes. The US hasn't been free market in the Adam Smith sense in ages, if ever.

well free markets meant something very different in adam smith's time; what they meant by free was 'free from rents' whereas today its usually mean in the milton freedman terms as 'free from any interference' which is how i interpret the parent poster...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market#Classical_Economic...

It's not free from interference either. It requires enforcing antitrust, for example, which the US seems to have forgotten. Literally what you quoted:

> the term free market refers to a market free from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities.

yep, to keep them "free" you have to "interefere" with them

as an aide, the overloading of the term free is really annoying because it muddles things so much...

D: "I want to be free" by Milton Schulman.

H: Milton Friedman.

D: Why are they all called Milton? Anyway, I've only got as far as Milton Keynes.

H: Maynard Keynes.

D: I'm sure there's a Milton Keynes.

H: Yes, there is, but it's... [appears quite miffed]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgUemV4brDU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Keynes

Coincidentally it’s where the British version of the Office is set

> free from any interference

That’s even less true in the US these days, though

This Schroedinger's Freedom is getting tired now. They happily label themself as free-market democratic liberal progressive when you're justifying bombing a poor third-world country, but suddenly claim to be unfree undemocratic oligarchic whenever anyone asks them to act on that principle.

Adam Smith himself knew you had to constrain the market in ordner to protect capitalism from capitalists. His work didn't end with his first book.

Yes, it’s freedom both from state interference but also from monopolies, oligopolies and trusts using their position to suppress the competitiveness of other market participants. Which is generally impossible to prevent without the state interfering in the markets.

Which is why a free market requires regulation, but only for the purpose to break up trusts, cartels and monopolies, and to ensure equal access to the market and a level playing field.

It's not a trivial problem to solve and probably requires constant readjustment, and there's probably plenty of room for ambiguity in assessing which decision would make the market more free or whether something is or isn't hurting market freedom. But some regulation is undeniably necessary.

I would include consumer rights protection and regulating uneven and unbalanced contracts. To an extent one might expect that sufficient competition could solve this but often it doesn’t. You usually are forced to buy goods/services as a bundle and don’t get to pick the terms and conditions.

While there might be other companies offering better terms the product quality of the first company might outweigh that from the perspective of the consumer. Of course one might argue that if a company is in a position to do that it’s effectively a monopoly and if all major market participants are engaging in that it’s effectively an oligopoly (or a case of implicit collusion)

And another (maybe less controversial example) is establishing minimal quality standards for at least certain products like food and drugs (i.e. the laissez faire offhands approach to that e.g. in the early 1900s resulted in some severe issues) because effectively that means that companies are selling products with hidden defects.

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