"Basic free market economics" are a convenient lie to make trying to prognosticate on the economy easier. It's built on a set of flawed axioms based around perf

"Basic free market economics" are a convenient lie to make trying to prognosticate on the economy easier. It's built on a set of flawed axioms based around perfect information, extremely low barriers of entry, long time horizons of investors and capital [0], and ignoring things like natural monopolies and network effects. It's a toy model that doesn't match our experience. Your environmental example is equally bad even when people have easy direct damages they can show like the Exxon Valdeeze spill the cost of litigation is massively skewed in favor of the company who can afford to drag cases out for a decade or more until the plaintiffs simply run out of money and have to take a smaller settlement. It's even worse with a lot of pollutants where the effect is more minor but drastically worsens a person's life but happens to so many people it's in aggregate a huge cost. Usually those take the form of an increased risk or prevalence of disease and the company gets to argue endlessly about their culpability for poisoning people because it's hard to prove the negative that they wouldn't have gotten cancer/breathing problems/etc in the absence of the pollution... [0] to allow long term profitable companies to weather short term undercutting by larger companies who can take the losses to kill a competitor for example)