Exactly, Adam Smith was no laissez-faire ideologue.

https://gutenberg.edu/2013/03/adam-smith-was-no-laissez-fair...

It could be that idea of a free market if everyone did what was right and not cheat, screw over, sabotage the competition to get ahead. You beat the competition by being better.

We don't have that though, people are assholes, so we have a regulated market.

The problem is the system. Let us assume we have 99.9% moral people who never lie and never break the law even if they can gef away with it. Problem is the 0.1% have a competitive advantage. They will accumulate more wealth and power than the others. The others can either compromise on their morality or lose ground against their competition, maybe failing entirely. The amoral people will gain outsized power and will force others to sacrifice their values. The whole system can be corrupted by a tiny minority.

I certainly do blame some individuals who are particularly vile, like Zuckerberg and Musk, but for the most part this is just what happens in competition.

> The problem is the system.

The problem is the people. Everything else after that I agree with. For a completely free market to work 100% of the people would have to be moral, upstanding people.

A completely free, unregulated, market is an anarchocapitalist's utopia. Like how a working socialist government is a utopia.

Neither of those is realistic though, so we have a regulated free market.

Regulators are also people.

I agree. The idea should be "perfectly competitive" -- which could be very regulated.

Noah Smith had a good article on this with links to economics papers and brief summaries:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-economists-revolt

"Uncoerced market" or something, is closer to the meaning I seek.

"Free market" is a fine term. People just forget about the "market" part.

A "market" isn't some natural emergent property of the physical or social world. They aren't formed by, like, volcanoes. A market, historically, is a space defined deliberately by a governing body where traders are allowed to participate and where trade is allowed to occur under a given set of rules.

It's suposed to be a free market, not a free anything-goes-chaos-and-anarchy.