>There is a deeply-ingrained view that the market is optimally efficient (for what?) and any attempt to regulate or direct it will result in inefficiency at bes

>There is a deeply-ingrained view that the market is optimally efficient (for what?) and any attempt to regulate or direct it will result in inefficiency at best, and deep structural problems at worst. No the view is that there are some necessary forms of regulatory intervention, some that are harmful, and a grey area where it depends on your priorities (are you optimising for economic growth, or are you optimising for, say, environmental protection at the cost of growth; both are valid.) Only a tiny fringe of weirdo anarcho-capitalists think there should be zero government intervention in the economy. Treating any free market liberal as having equivalent views is a ridiculous straw man. >This belief is totally free-standing, built on rhetoric alone, and obviously wrong (you literally cannot make a free market, it's not a coherent concept). God talk about the irony. You haven't made a single logical argument in your whole post. Your post is pure ideology. Making bare assertions like "you literally cannot make a free market" or "policies inspired by this are uniformly disastrous" isn't an argument. It is unsubstantiated rubbish. >Policies inspired by this thinking are uniformly disastrous People that say this sort of thing have no idea how horrible life was when everything in society was heavily regulated. Do you have any idea how inefficient goods delivery across the US was before trucking was deregulated? Sadly it didn't get done at the state level to the same extent. The result is that it is now cheaper in many cases to have things delivered from outside your state even though it is further away. >and we've finally begun buckling under the weight of the wealth gap it created. Nothing is buckling. A "wealth gap" doesn't matter. What matter is absolute levels of wealth. It sounds like you would rather everyone be equally impoverished than for some to be rich and others to be extremely rich. The average person today - even the average poor person today - is extraordinarily rich by historical standards. That is entirely because of free markets. This is economic history 101.