Comment by mcv
3 days ago
Which is why a free market requires regulation, but only for the purpose to break up trusts, cartels and monopolies, and to ensure equal access to the market and a level playing field.
It's not a trivial problem to solve and probably requires constant readjustment, and there's probably plenty of room for ambiguity in assessing which decision would make the market more free or whether something is or isn't hurting market freedom. But some regulation is undeniably necessary.
I would include consumer rights protection and regulating uneven and unbalanced contracts. To an extent one might expect that sufficient competition could solve this but often it doesn’t. You usually are forced to buy goods/services as a bundle and don’t get to pick the terms and conditions.
While there might be other companies offering better terms the product quality of the first company might outweigh that from the perspective of the consumer. Of course one might argue that if a company is in a position to do that it’s effectively a monopoly and if all major market participants are engaging in that it’s effectively an oligopoly (or a case of implicit collusion)
And another (maybe less controversial example) is establishing minimal quality standards for at least certain products like food and drugs (i.e. the laissez faire offhands approach to that e.g. in the early 1900s resulted in some severe issues) because effectively that means that companies are selling products with hidden defects.