Haha, do they?

I think the question is how do you define free? Free for powerful to do anything they want? Free subject to govt control? The tension is between those points.

The term is "free markets" which have a reasonably agreed upon definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

Absolutely, nothing has brought a greater level of prosperity and equality to the world than free market capitalism. This is simply an empirical fact. Just like it is an empirical fact that every socialist nation in history has created huge levels of poverty and inequality.

I feel like the fall of the British Empire and subsequent reversion to the mean is probably responsible for most of that prosperity.

The revision to what mean? The pre-British empire mean? Because pre-British empire wasn’t exactly a prosperous period.

Hey, remember when the USSR started and they eliminated homelessness within 10 years. And also, were the first to space. In addition, had citizens that were better fed than the US, had more doctors per capita. And this is just from State Capitalism, not Socialism.

No I don’t, because that never happened. I do remember millions of soviet citizens dying from famine though, and millions more dying from state sponsored killing. I don’t remember any famines taking place in developed free markets during that period. However, I have a pretty clear memory of the two class system that developed in all of the socialist nations that existed in the 20th century. One of the starving poor, and another of the rich oligarchs.