Well, an internal, relatively free market with some barriers against foreign competition is exactly the strategy that a number of Asian countries employed to get rich, and furthermore, earlier in its history the USA did exactly the same thing. Whether it is "antithetical" or not.

I think your comment is low quality. Like I made an effort here to write at length about how government and economics work in the hopes that someone would learn from it, and you strawmanned one idea and called it "wild." This is not the Hacker News way and it is not commenting in good faith.

Free markets are unnatural. Monopoly is natural.

Free markets only exist in unnaturally heavily regulated circumstances. If you let the markets to be on their own devices then you get monopoly. Regulation is ironically what makes free markets possible.

It's basically exactly the same as democracy vs feudalism.