Thie is a charming free-market story, but the problem comes when people construe it as "unplanned, unregulated and competitive is always better". The idea that

Thie is a charming free-market story, but the problem comes when people construe it as "unplanned, unregulated and competitive is always better". The idea that things can "work themselves out" to a better result than if supervised is highly exciting, to the point that some cannot resist it and just fall in love with it. This leads to the classic "Man-with-a-hammer", as C.Munger calls it: this is so good, let's hammer/free-market all the things! Games are full of Man-with-a-hammer examples, like "bluff all the things" (eg. poker), "sacrifice all the things" (chess) or "never run to win the race" (backgammon). This inevitably leads to failure, but economy being what it is, the failure is too vague, too diffuse and too erratic to acknowledge them in the case of "free market all the things".