Free markets are a useful fiction that was developed around the time of Adam Smith. They are ( I think, anyway ) a demonstrable improvement over mercantilism. W

Free markets are a useful fiction that was developed around the time of Adam Smith. They are ( I think, anyway ) a demonstrable improvement over mercantilism. We more or less know how, and we more or less know why. The problem with "things that are not free markets" is that we simply know very little about those things, and the learning curve is significant. USAian bulk crops agriculture is not a free market, it mostly seems to work well that way but it started under FDR and only reached its present form after decades of tweaking. In effect ( the theory goes that ) larger price uncertainties will create price instabilities that, net-net, add more inefficiency than pricing things a skosh higher and accommodating overproduction. As political speech, the term "free market" has been rendered threadbare. "Trade agreements" seem to mostly be more akin to Mercantilism than free markets, and so on.