There is no true free market in the world. One of the defining characteristics of a free market is perfect information. This is one of the downsides of market imperfections.
I would avoid the term "imperfection" for something that is fundamental to markets. The information on conditions of production usually has to come from the seller and there is usually little incentive for them to provide it unless compelled to.
Unregulated? Do regulated markets have perfect information?
Regulations and activism (such as this type of journalism) are some of the non-market forces that can compensate.
Activism may be biased. It may also lead to long-winded debates, and ultimately, to polluted information. (Eg, global warming, GM crops, etc).
Ultimately, it doesn't matter if there is regulation or not, activism or not; there is no perfect information.
http://wichitaliberty.org/free-markets/myth-markets-depend-o...
Can you help me understand why free markets "by definition" require that which cannot exist?
Because, like "perfect information", "free markets" are an abstract conceptual ideal.
You can also see this with some of the smaller-scale Ponzis and investment scams - so long as the amount of money each investor has invested is much smaller than the amount it'd cost to investigate the investment, it's not rational for them to do so. One of the recent US Ponzis, Perma-Pave, actually failed because they got greedy and took on a large investor with reason to investigate what had happened to their money.
We actually had a lengthy experiment with that earlier in America, pre-regulation. It's where the term "snake oil salesman" originated. The establishment of medical licensing led to a dramatic improvement in public health.
If there's one characteristic of deregulation advocates that you can count on, it's that they have a complete disregard for history.
As for democracy, many attempts have been utterly subverted by voter fraud -- e.g. myriad dictators that win >90% of the "vote" in their countries. It is only through strict regulation that we've come to trust the accuracy of our polls to the degree that we have in the U.S. Having said that, what passes for democracy here is still utterly dominated by money, in that the best-funded candidate usually wins. Again, regulation of money in politics would be one way to improve on that defect.
... and medical licensing ... really?
'Perfect information' is an unrealistic assumption used in neoclassical models which treat knowledge as just another input, on a par with raw ore, pork bellies or gasoline. In the real world it just doesn't work like that.
The defining characteristic of the free market is that it is a creative process of discovery. It creates knowledge where none existed before. There can be no such thing in principle as 'perfect information'. Information tends to exist in the state of being inherently dispersed among the actors, often tacit to the point of being inexpressible. The market facilitates the use of such knowledge, and the the discovery of new knowledge.