Only the rich, rather than the market, were free in this apparently in any meaningful sense of the word, beyond the incidental outcomes.

The US taxpayers who invested trillions (largely in the guise of military expenses) in inventing the tech [1] didn't get to decide freely how the business to be conducted or how the profits to be shared. The Chinese workers (or similar ones elsewhere) didn't get to move freely to places for work with competitive wages.

The rich had the freedom to take the publicly funded tech, to exploit the confined sweatshops, all the while without even paying regular taxes that the ordinary Joe has no way to avoid [2].

[1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/what-the-ste... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/03/04/w...

That's why I used the qualifier "democratically tenable". The human calculus of equity and fairness isn't something we have a firm grip on or even an adequate appreciation of, but I think it's safe to say objective, absolute improvements in either individual or collective welfare don't necessarily account for much; and our cost functions for particular benefits and risks less than obvious or intuitive.

For the academically inclined, I suggest looking into the field of disequilibrium economics, which asks and tries to model what occurs when markets are not in their magical ‘equilibrium’ (where supply & demand cross at the magical market-clearing price p*), and the dynamics by which (if possible) the market in question goes from being out-of-whack to in equilibrium. As for most topics in any subject nowadays, the Wikipedia has a page that serves as a very good jump-off point to delve into the heady and rarefied heights of this obscure sub-discipline: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disequilibrium_macroeconomic...

> The most recent example is China turning to free markets, and the resulting vast improvement in their economy.

China hasn't turned to anything like textbook Anglosphere free markets. Yeah they loosened up and turned away from classical central planning, but state-owned firms still control 30% of assets and their government does quite a to set economic policy and direction. They didn't privatize everything and let the free market run amok.

[1] http://blogs.worldbank.org/eastasiapacific/state-owned-enter...: With all these evidences in hand, we can now answer the question raised before: How big are Chinese SOEs? Even though their share in the economy continued to decline in the past decade, SOEs still make up a substantial part of the national economy – roughly controlling 30 percent of the total secondary and tertiary assets, or over 50 percent of total industrial assets.

The SOEs are not behind China’s economic growth. The export sector is.

https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2014/08/passages-i-highl...

> Westerners often describe China's explosive economic growth as a product of its export sector. This sector, however, is not "in the system": “The private export oriented sector suffered massive losses in jobs, earnings, and the closure of small companies in 2008 and 2009. But China’s banks were not exposed in any material way to this sector. It is simple fact that China’s financial system and its stock, bond, and loan markets cater only to the state sector, of which the “National Champions” represent the reddest of the Red. These corporations, the heart of China’s state owned economy, are “inside the system.” The private economy, no matter how vibrant is “outside the system,” and in fact serves the will of the system.” (p. x)

70% market oriented is a far cry from 0%. Fortunately, a free market doesn't have to be 100% in order to be effective.