Can a "free market" exist?

[It's That Guy]

The free market is an ideal. It has never existed in its pure state and it -can't-.

As you point out, capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Capitalism depends on competition. But where there is competition there are winners. And where there are big enough winners, there is no longer competition. The natural path for any market is towards monopolies. So it takes a certain amount of govt. regulation to maintain competition. Too little is as bad as too much. But our attitude today is that -any- regulation is bad.

The whole history of govt. regulation in the US is totally anti-free-market. Some new thing starts, like broadcasting 100 years ago or aviation in the 1920s. At first it's a free-for-all. Until one big company manages to pull ahead of the others--RCA and Westinghouse in one case, United and Pan Am and American in the other. Then these big companies go to the government and say 'You have to regulate so we can protect our markets!' And the regulations are written to give these 'winners' an open track to oligopolize the entire market. Then, after 50 years or so, the big companies are so solidly entrenched that they find regulation stifling, so they go to government and say 'Regulation is killing us! You have to de-regulate!' And the govt. deregulates! So the purpose of both regulation and de-regulation is to reward the winners and quash competition.

Karl Marx predicted that corporations would grow larger and more powerful. The more powerful they got, the more influence they'd have over governments until, eventually, the corporations would become more powerful than governments. At that point, corporations would no longer 'belong' to any one nation. They would become 'global capital' and search the earth for the cheapest labor and resources and the richest markets. He made that prediction 150 years ago, but if he was around today he'd be saying 'I told you so!'