And who said anything about a "centrally planned economy"? Certainly not me.
I dismiss "free market" on the premise that it doesn't exist and it never existed (and furthermore: that it can never exist). As soon as you have a government and regulations you don't have a free market. And even if you could have a free market, as soon as some players in the free market can grow big enough to change the market environment to their favor, it ceases to exist again. There is nothing to rebalance it automatically: only power plays.
>I still maintain the only alternative to giving people what they want is forcing them to follow your plan.
How about letting them decide and produce what they want, instead of "giving it" to them?
That's silly, freedom is a matter of degree. A market with some simple rules governing violence and the enforcement of contracts is certainly more free than a Soviet style planned economy. You can neither have a perfectly free market nor a perfectly controlled market. Even North Korea has a black market. Generally when talking about about the 'freedom' of a market, the measure which matters is not the arbitrary number of regulations which exist but the ability of players (both individuals and firms) to freely and knowingly enter into contracts and transactions. Laws which prohibit coercion, theft, and deception can aid in making the market more free in the ways that matter.
No -- but the ideology of the free market sidesteps the issues of huge imbalances and influencing and maintains BS about invisible hands and "egoism working for the better" long after they have been proven dead and burried.
Now, if that was only spread by some naive "free market" bloggers and the like that would be ok. But the bullshiting includes most of the souped down political economy that is fed to the masses and to policy makers by "financial experts" and "economy advisors" (and even most university classes on economy).
You have a centrally planned economy with an identity crisis. The supporters of which are loathe to admit it.
(Case in point)
I still maintain the only alternative to giving people what they want is forcing them to follow your plan. Historically people who take this path frequently turned out to be wrong, and all the people who they dragged kicking and screaming with them down the path end up bearing the brunt of the negative externalities for their poor decisions.
At least if you give people the absolute freedom to make their own choices when or if they end making bad ones they have only themselves to hold responsible. This is what annoys me most about this whole central economic planning groupthink people are prone to indulging in. The constant pretense that it's some well known scientific fact that only ignorant hicks aren't aware of on a level similar to evolution vs creationism with their ensuing, tired middle-brow dismissals.