>You need the other things to move away from the necessity of government regulation
I guess this is the crux of the matter. You are suggesting that transparency must pre-exist a free market, I am suggesting that a free market pre-exists transparency, and when necessary transparency will be demanded by the consumers.
The issue, I think, is that we have a different definition for a free market. A free market, by the definition I am using, functions at peak efficiency and is free from monopoly and large stakeholder or government intervention/regulation. For that to occur, the kind of transparency I'm talking about must theoretically be present.
If transparency came afterward, what happened prior would not be perfectly efficient and would be vulnerable to monopolization, intervention or unbalanced deals and so would not, by definition, be a free market.
>What's important is the principle of subjective value--that the buyer and the seller value what they are getting more than what they are giving up--and that can happen without the various criteria of transparency you outline.
No, that's important to a market period. A free market is a specific thing.
You need the other things to move away from the necessity of government regulation (transparency, for example.) If you don't know what's in that apple and nobody is going to make sure it's safe, you can't buy or sell it efficiently.