> So "if we really believed in the free market", we should regulate the details of how a private transaction can take place? Yes. I don't think "free market" i

> So "if we really believed in the free market", we should regulate the details of how a private transaction can take place? Yes. I don't think "free market" is incredibly well defined but the concept it evokes to me (as someone with a degree in economics), is a market approaching perfect competition[0], which is well defined. A perfectly competitive market has a number of requirements, things like low barriers to entry, lots of buyers and sellers, no externalities, and so on. A government policy that intervenes to try to aid perfect competition (e.g. some anti-trust legislation) could still be called a "free market", I think. That said, I realize some people seem to define it to mean "free" from all government interventions, but they don't have a monopoly (heh) on the use of the word. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition