Promoting "Free Markets" on the Washington Post Opinion Pages

Jeff Bezos

Today's New York Times website contained an article entitled "Bezos Orders Washington Post Opinion Section to Embrace 'Personal Liberties and Free Markets'. All opinion pieces will now advocate this point of view and the paper will not be permitted to publish opposing viewpoints. In response to this, the Post's opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned.

This move to overt one-sided propaganda echoes the editorial position of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal whose "informal tagline" is reportedly 'Free markets, free people'.

Aside from being a useful reminder of the downsides of oligarchic/plutocratic rule, this news could also be useful in prompting people to ask themselves: what does the phrase 'free markets' actually mean?

Despite being in common every day use, the term 'free markets' rarely appears in an economics textbook, and when it does, it is used uncritically in the everyday sense. This is unfortunate, because by not discussing properly authors omit a chance to say something illuminating about the nature of markets and the role of the public sector in organizing and regulating them.

Our Microeconomics Anti-Textbook (p.77) quotes Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang's 2010 book, 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, on this topic: 

‘The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.’ By failing to emphasize this fundamental point, the texts leave the way open for people to fall victim to arguments that removing certain regulations will restore the “free market” or that introducing certain regulations will be an unwarranted departure from the “free market”. Chang (p.10) writes: ‘Recognizing that the boundaries of the market are ambiguous and cannot be determined in an objective way lets us realize that economics is not a science like physics or chemistry, but a political exercise.’