If you have a better product. A bigger corporate shouldn't be allowed to use its war chest to swing things in favor through buying out politicians, law or other such stuff.
We do not live in a free society, we are not free to do whatever we want; for example, I don't think anyone says we should be 'free' to murder anyone we want.
I think the GP is more accurate with fair. I'd actually say, it's a guaranteed to be 'open market' we want; meaning everyone must play by the same rules. Of course the challenge is that whoever sets the rules, will end up protecting their own interests, and then we end up where we are anyway. Maybe we can turn to AI to be absolutely fair in creating rules to establish open markets... and then AI becomes the pure benevolent dictator, except for that pesky off by one error I left lurking in the code :/
Which will make it non free. Free market requires mechanisms of preventing monopolies by its definition.
According to wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
"... are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority."
The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but that implies that the government is intervening in the market. All I was pointing out is that there is no perfect system where politics, monopolies and private interests won't compete to control the market.
That's up to the society which wants to have a free market. For instance, anti-trust laws is one way of doing it.
> The government is supposed to step in to block monopolies from controlling the market, but that implies that the government is intervening in the market.
Someone should to step in here, whether it's government or not, is another question. But clearly, if market has no way of preventing a monopoly, it's not really free.
Actually, it is the central question, because without a feasible answer all you have is a fine-sounding principle that is utterly infeasible.
> One view is that a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.
That's how I define it. Monopoly makes the market non free.
But here's the thing... if there ends up being a monopoly, who exactly is going to intervene to stop it, if not the government or other authority?
Free market, which btw has grown to become a economical and political buzzword, is not "the ideal market of whatever one's personal ideology thinks will work best"; The core ideology behind it was to let the buyer and seller work on what works for them and keep third party interference to the least.
Fair market imply either party is made aware of all the details behind the trade in case of which price discovery is impossible as the buyers won't buy above real value and sellers won't sell below real value. Anti-trust and Anti-monopoly laws that are sub-points of a fair market are inherently against the ideal free market.
Also, theory does not really work in practice and no market is entirely free or fair.