To me at least, it means a market in which the basic rules of commerce are enforced but beyond that the government doesn't micromanage. For example, contracts are enforced, there's some basic truth in advertising laws, there's a trustworthy currency available, and all the other basics of civilization like "your competitor isn't allowed to murder you".

It's obviously a fuzzy scale.

In a free market like that it's not guaranteed that everything ends in monopoly. Actually mostly it won't. Monopolies that do occur are due to high costs of entry and are usually temporary.

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Yizahi a day ago | parent [-]

In the market you have described we will inevitably end with a monopoly in everything, simply because you didn't mention anything preventing that. To avoid monopoly a much more micromanaging government is required. At minimum we would need a specialized bureaucracy department investigating monopolies, an advanced legislative and judicial systems enforcing such laws, a lot of regulation regarding common social good (e.g. you can't just undercut competitors by selling poisonous shit, and you can't just bribe law enforcement to do the same), we would need an overreaching borders/customs/tariffs to block companies from countries not concerned about selling poisonous shit to undercut foreign competitors. And the list goes on.

Basically free market advocates fail to see more that a single step in the complex web of dependencies, which tries to prevent neo-feudal monopolization of everything by unchecked, unelected and being above most laws and taxes, robber barons.

I dislike unnecessary bureaucracy and excessive government control as much as anyone, I was born in the authoritarian USSR after all and I do study history. But I fear neo-feudalism even more. I certainly have zero self-delusions about being in a "ruling class" in that potential free market dystopia.

	▲	mike_hearn 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not that we can't see them - I literally named some examples. But where is the evidence for your specific claims, because there's plenty of evidence against them. Markets without much regulation are routinely very competitive. Look at the computing industry, which for most of its history had no industry-specific regulations at all beyond the illegalization of hacking - a simple extension of private property rights. And the effect by which regulation actually strengthens incumbents and reduces competition is well known. A common problem in these discussions is conflation of different goals. You talk about companies selling "poisonous shit". That's not a competition related goal so has nothing to do with anything I've been saying. It's an environmental goal. Governments often pass environmental law fully accepting that it will reduce competition and might strengthen or even create new incumbents - and they don't care! In fact most environmental law is like that because it's exactly as you say, other countries like China don't pass such laws and out-compete local firms as a consequence. But that's not a failure of the free market. It's a failure of environmental law. Or, sometimes not even a failure, just a known tradeoff. As a general rule it's hard to find markets that are controlled by monopolies over the long run without government regulation being to blame. Temporary monopolies can arise naturally and there's nothing wrong with that, but over time they usually fall by the wayside unless a law is preventing that from happening.