[bfe]

Acting in favor of individual businesses is usually orthogonal or antithetical to acting in favor of the free market.

Big businesses and the politicians who love them often rely heavily on erasing the perception of that difference.

[mncolinlee]

It depends whether you're describing "the free market" religion or "the free market" reality.

In practice, most politicians mean an economy tilted in favor of multinational corporations when they use these dog whistle terms. It is an offense to everything Adam Smith stood for, but it's what they really mean by "free market." The real Adam Smith believed modern-style multinational corporations were a recipe for corruption.

"The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."

[stcredzero]

dog whistle terms

That's a great phrase. I look on in trepidation at the almost mechanical way folks in their teens and 20's react to memes. I find parallels in the way programmers parrot half-truths and untruths. And of course, there's the joke that passes for political discourse on TV.

Really, we 1st world people aren't that much more sophisticated than 19th century Russian peasants chanting "Constantine and constitution" thinking "constitution" was Constantine's wife.