[asark]

At this point I think "free market" is mostly a term of propaganda. It's too loose and wide-ranging to be useful for productive discussion, and meanwhile "free" is always good, right, so who would want a non free market? Monsters, surely.

[drucik]

No, it is an economics term describing a type of market, as an opposution to regulated one, as often sugar industry is, for example. Maybe you mean the fact that there are regulations and therefore no one has a free market? If that's so - c'mon, let's be a bit reasonable. It's as if you were saying that people are not free, cause they cannot do everything they want. As someone else wrote here, the role of the government is to make sure that everything is working to benefit the society, and definitely to protect the people.

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.

[dragonwriter]

> > At this point I think "free market" is mostly a term of propaganda.

> 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.

[asark]

Markets as we know them are products of regulation. That's why "free market" is such a useless term. It can mean anything one likes, including "no" regulation (for certain values of "no"—now let's have fun figuring out what that means). It can mean markets regulated to make them "more free"—greater information transparency and standardization, for example. Depends entirely on your perspective.

"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.

[andrenth]

The problem is that governments are made of people too, with the same sort of self interest as everybody else.