The article mentions that we incorrectly use the term "free market" to describe the optimal market system, but I'd argue we do a similar thing with regulation.

The article mentions that we incorrectly use the term "free market" to describe the optimal market system, but I'd argue we do a similar thing with regulation. We use "regulation" to describe the "ideal regulation", and both these term misuses divide people that might otherwise agree. I'll give one example: patents. Right now there is a discussion about waiving pharma patents in order to help with vaccine production in other countries. This is framed as a government action against businesses, when in reality it is an act of deregulation of markets. Patents are an incredibly heavy handed government regulation that uses tax dollars to protect state-sponsored monopolies of "ideas" and "inventions", creating a huge drain in terms of legal resources (courts, judges, juries if necessary), have obvious regulatory capture dynamics as that is in fact the stated goal of a patent, as well as creating entire sectors of the "private" economy that exist solely to perpetuate this system (patent lawyers, patent trolls, etc.), not to mention create networks of "safe havens" of theoretically competitor companies that are actually "allied" in their accumulation of mutually-assured-destruction patent portfolios that make it almost impossible for new startups to enter a field since they hold no such cards. It's unfortunate that the "deregulation" discussion has been largely co-opted by these corporations as opposed to focusing on these IMO much more pertinent issues that could actually have a dramatically more positive effect.