Free Market

Also found in: Dictionary, Thesaurus, Legal, Acronyms, Encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Free Market

A system of economics that minimizes government intervention and maximizes the role of the market. According to the theory of the free market, rational economic actors acting in their own self interest deal with information and price goods and services the most efficiently. Government regulations, trade barriers, and labor laws are generally thought to distort the market. Proponents of the free market argue that it provides the most opportunities for both consumers and producers by creating more jobs and allowing competition to decide what businesses are successful. Critics maintain that an unfettered free market concentrates wealth in the hands of a few, which is unsustainable in the long term. In practice, no country or jurisdiction has a completely free market. See also: Deregulation, Classical economics, Keynesian economics, Marxism, Monetarism, Chicago School, Austrian School.

References in periodicals archive ?

Many people who advocate free markets are not libertarians but radical capitalists, and many libertarians do not consistently advocate free markets or do not do so on solid philosophic ground.

Paul Krugman: Master of the straw-man fallacy

If the majority were well grounded in such principles and understood the limitations of government actions, they would not have been hoodwinked into believing that the crisis of 2008-2009 resulted from the excesses of free markets.

The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future

The next time you hear the free market being blamed for our ills.

Long live free markets

Yet there is evidence that, whatever their misgivings about the transition process, Central Europeans continue to prefer the free market to socialism.

Is Liberalism dead in central Europe? The disturbing return of socialism and authoritarianism in the former Soviet bloc

Yet thanks to the black market (the free market driven underground by government regulation), drugs are available everywhere, including inside prisons and in schools.

Libertarianism

To have that, though, we would need a truly free market.

Market contradictions

The free market, for all its virtues, does fuel a consumerist mind-set that's personally and socially destructive.

IT'S NOT EASY BEING 'CRUNCHY'

It is a beautiful thing this free market in which every individual pursues his or her own personal interests and thereby affects an optimal outcome for the entire society.

How the free market killed New Orleans

Moreover, Rustow pointed out, in capitalism's early years there existed an abundance of ethical capital from a previous Christian society that greatly enhanced the beneficial effects of the free market.

The maturing of a humane economist

And "barely attentive" does not even come close to describing the aggressive foisting of the free market model on economies around the world that so typified the Bush/Clinton era.

Empire's apologists

Stratton added that the principles of a free market did not favor business anarchy, that instead the U.

Stratton `pleads guilty' to favoring free markets

The free market offers a precise and flawless mechanism for weeding out the ones that don't add value to people's lives, thus wasting a society's scarce resources.