Comment by collingreen

I don't think the "free" in free market is supposed to mean no rules. I think the "free" is supposed to mean both sides of the transactions get to choose to participate or not which means they are pressured to "meet in the middle" and optimize for mutually beneficial deals. The idea is that this is going to provide better outcomes than trying to plan out what everyone makes and buys from the top.

Overregulation can reduce the effective freedom in a market (usually by increasing costs or reducing choice) but good regulation is there to shepherd this equilibrium of a fair deal between buyers and sellers by doing things like getting externalities priced in (if youre buying x you should pay the cost of x, not your neighbor); preventing monopolies, cartels, other price fixing / choice reducing things that makes one side of the market not have to meet in the middle; and adding standards or visibility so market participants can be more efficient and safe when choosing (instead of having to do things like research all of a company's supply chain and employees to decide if it's safe to eat there or to fly in their planes).

Some things get imposed onto the market intentionally like protection for unions (in theory an alternative/shortcut to grouping up into inefficient passthrough companies), tarrifs to give someone an advantage in what they can offer, subsidies to intentionally prevent the market from contracting to the current size of demand (like if the country wants to maintain a certain ability to produce food or doctors or certain goods), and government programs to effectively set a floor on the price of something (like interest rates so lending/borrowing will never be worse than a certain mark).

All these things are useful tools in a market of self motivated actors trying to maximize their own gain in the short term but, like all tools, they get abused and out maneuvered often so it's a constant game of cat and mouse to keep the system running.

Pros and cons all over the place; most things have a huge downside of vulnerability to truly bad actors having too much control (which is where the idea of democracy comes in but I have to stop myself I already word dumped).

tl;dr yes absolutely call it a free market until people are forced to participate too much