The free market will necessarily reward a small number of winners way out of proportion to everyone else. These companies will have a much larger lobbying war chest. Stuff like this is not somehow a betrayal of market principles, but the perfectly predictable result.

It is all very well excluding corporate lobbying from your scholastic definition of a free market. Such a market will never exist anywhere for more than five minutes.

Yah. We should make regulation for this kind of behavior.

Oh boy, I really want to hear how you think the "Free Market" solves this problem.

Remember kids: If it's broken, apply Free Market liberally to the affected areas.

Uh..get rid of the government involved in all these tax laws. Obviously?

Are you suggesting complicated taxes isn't the government's fault?

I think the implication is that countries that espouse their "free market"-ness end up with a lot of regulatory capture. This, telecoms, healthcare.

A bunch of people with a lot of money have been able to lock in their positions. It sure feels like pulling out of the church of laissez-faire economics would let us, say, pass laws with things like price controls (or just nationalizing the whole industry!).

An aside: complicated taxes aren't the opposite of "free market". For example, giving tax incentives to new companies can help make a market more free by reducing the cost of entry.

Sorry, you're never going to have a society where the government is a 100% neutral referee and everybody else is a part of the 'free market'. As long as there is an incentive to rig the game, people are gonna rig it.