This. I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the th

This. I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the thing they wanted to obtain more than the currency required to obtain it wound up with those things, and then they went through some graphs of how the maths of that all works out in theory. This was a model from classical economics. I remember thinking wow that's such a beautiful and cool model. Then lecturer turns around and says despite the fact the graph from the model matches our live demonstration almost exactly, it turns out things don't work like this in the real world. The reason being that a reasonable number of people lie, steal and otherwise cheat, and it turns out the effects of that are somewhat non-trivial. It made me realize that the effect that bad actors have on the free market are actually quite significant. I've also realized over the years that when you look deep enough, not much of anything is "well functioning".