[CriticalSection]

> Do we want politicians making decisions for businesses and controlling the free market?

So a visa only available to workers with a certain skill set that chained them to companies is the free market?

> It's surprising how quickly the terms "free market" and "free trade" have disappeared from HN.

Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless.

That the word free is attached to it is part of the propaganda element, what's the alternative, an unfree market?

And the word market is the meaningless. How is a market selling radishes in the USA for dollars today different than a market selling radishes in the USSR for rubles in 1951? They're the same thing. What's different is production, namely who controlled it - in the USA, production is overwhelmingly owned and controlled by heirs who do not work and who spend their days jetting to things like the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas - in the USSR production was not controlled by that class.

[Terr_]

> Because a phrase like "free market" is propaganda and meaningless.

Well, if not propaganda, at least ambiguous, yeah.

Adding on to that: If there's any group that distrusts the modifier "free", it's techies who've seen enough open-source stuff to remember "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech".