There is no such thing as a free market, nor a centrally planned one, outside of thought experiments. A real market is composed of discrete players (you never

There is no such thing as a free market, nor a centrally planned one, outside of thought experiments. A real market is composed of discrete players (you never have unlimited options) with things like friction, collusion, switching costs and stickiness at all levels, cognitive overhead, conflicts of interest (a firm making suboptimal decisions because influential people in the firm will personally benefit from the decisions). There are natural monopolies and economies of scale, as well as insurmountable moats, intellectual property creating monopolies or deadweight loss, an omnipotent (unlimited money) central planning committee (central bank) making decisions that can directly affect you… Conversely you cannot have true central planning because it essentially violates an economic version of the CAP theorem (you’ll never have synchronized perfect information in a way that’s fault tolerant) and assuming production is constrained, optimally balancing all constraints is NP-complete. But even beyond that you have incomplete or falsified information, defection (deviate from the plan due to disagreement) and corruption, some outcomes being inherently noisy or unpredictable, the need to delegate, lack of price discovery or disambiguating between stated and revealed preferences… All we can do is try to patch on changes to any approach to address shortcomings. Although the strong rule of law and consistency in the US legal system makes things extremely stable, it also enshrines loopholes and bad outcomes, so in some ways I wonder if China’s system (which relies on its decision makers being relatively competent and benevolent-ish, which they’ve been very fortunate to benefit from since Deng) might be better given they can throw out rule of law to force outcomes.