> But for decades, the American market has not been free.

The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic property of free markets in practice.

Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do.

Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.

Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all.

Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.

Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.

The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.