Once you have copyright there no longer is a free market economy. In a true free market economy, anyone who has a copy would be free to distribute those missing episodes and could do so easily since the price of making additional copies is effectively zero. In a reality with copyright your argument needs to take into account the purpose of why there is copyright in the first place. In the US the original purpose of copyright was to incentivize the creation of content and locking up content goes against that.