The Gloomy Historian explains how it is a mistake to view the “free market” as some sort of independent, even natural entity, rather than a system of rules backed and enforced by government and others. Here’s a snippet:

When abstractions are spoken of as real things, we call it reification. Reification is a semantic fallacy, but its use is sometimes necessary when one wants to communicate complex realities with considerably less words. However, a semantic fallacy, if not challenged, can go on to support faulty conceptualizations of reality, especially once it seeps into discourse. The special problem in this case is that the reification complements an ideology, one that rejects the natural and necessary role of the government in the maintenance of the economy. If expressed as a thing, “free market” can be thought of as being interfered with or kept from its natural activities. If expressed as an entity, it can be given agency, rationality, and rights. We often talk about government intrusions in the personal lives of people. For some, a worse offense is when the government intrudes in the free market.

But this conveys a faulty conception of reality. As Robert Reich states: “Government doesn’t ‘intrude’ on the free market. It defines and organizes (and often reorganizes) it.” In reality, an economy is the product of an infrastructure of law that is created, maintained, and enforced by the government. It is an extension of the state for the purpose of ordering the complex human interactions that occur with economic activity. And with the constant growth and complexity of technology, which puts economic relations in flux and opens loop holes for economic actors to exploit, these interactions need to be monitored regularly and the laws adjusted accordingly. The “free market” is not a thing with a right to existence and freedom from molestation; it is a name for something that does not exist without the state and whose quality is wholly dependent upon the laws that form it.