What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Ha-Joon Chang, writing in the Guardian, demonstrates that the free market is a myth. Company profits depend on the ‘welfare payments’ they get from society.
It is time that we dispensed with the myth that the market is a force of nature that should not be meddled with. Markets are social creations that can be, and have been, modified for social purposes
Thomas M Hanna has this interesting post about the alternative if we reject the mythical ideal of the “free market“
The free market utopia is in fact a banana republic, an individualistic Randian society in which a small group of extremely wealthy individuals, hidden away in gated communities and protected by their disproportionate influence of key functions of the state (the courts, political parties, and so on), control the vast majority of productive wealth and property while the rest of the population is forced to fight for an ever shrinking share of whatever scraps are left on the table.