> The best anyone can hope for is a free market, with everything properly priced. But for decades, the American market has not been free. It’s used purposefully added friction to exploit a time asymmetry between the business and you. And due to things like call centers, this has been very profitable for the businesses. Cable companies and insurance rely on the fact that your time is more valuable than theirs. They can hire people in India at scale to waste your time.

That is the market being free, George.

The market actually is not very free, because large companies increasingly use their weight to pull off things that smaller companies or individual customers cannot afford: lobby to obtain preferences, tax exemptions, exclusive deals, other favors that violate or at least skirt the law.

But running a call center overseas is not one of these things.

People often confuse “free” with “fair”.

A "free market" is one in which all the participants of the market have perfect information and act completely rationally. This is, of course, an academic ideal, similar to solving a physics problem that tells you to ignore friction.

What we have is a "capitalist market", where those with more power (capital) within the market leverage it to exploit the other participants. Capitalists use their money to extract as much money as possible from a segment of the market, usually destroying it in the process. But for a beautiful moment in time they created a lot of value for shareholders!

No. The market being free would mean that a private person can also hire Indians to call companies.