Bad-actors exist, regardless of the market-construct they participate in how we implement the freedom of free-market defines what damage they can and will do.
If a school puts up a kiss-and-go lane by which children can be dropped off by their parents expeditiously in the morning, watch how many grownups ignore the ”rule,” get out of their car, walk inside of the school to drop their child off in person. Completely ignorant to the interest of others who, in accordance with the benefit of the rule, attempt to get to work on time.
Some people are just incapable of pairing personal interests with collective interests and need a little help provided by the “enforcement” department. A reason why regulation as the basis for enforcement is the necessary paradoxical ingredient to protect the integrity of freedom for us all.
The point is no market-construct will ever eliminate the need for regulation from the bad and ignorant actors as described above. And a free-market construct will need to deal with the same behavior, as the actors are the same. Hence a free-market cannot be void of paradoxical regulation to operate.
The problem is we have never deployed a free-market, for we have never defined what freedom actually means (until now). And thus, our ability to deal with impending monopolies has not been challenged the way it should.
Our freedom is oligarchically controlled, which makes it quite the opposite of free. The monopolies that currently flourish are precisely those in the interest of the oligarchies that desire them. A perpetuating pursuit of self-interest that only breaks down when it loses its opacity, and its negative impact is visible to the public. At which time the public alerts its government to implement downstream (after-the-fact) band-aid legislation, it should have established upstream (before-hand) as proof of failed governance.
In a free-market based on the pre-established principles of freedom, the paradoxical rules of freedom applied to the market-construct are set beforehand. Not unlike the rules of soccer are set before the game starts. That does not prevent some players from getting a yellow or red card. But it does prevent bad actors from destroying the game before it is too late.
So, to answer your question. In a newly defined construct of a free-market mechanism, as mentioned above, monopolies deemed harmful to society will be weeded out before they do serious harm to our collective interest, not after. And in the long-run, that will prevent the narrow interests of egoists from festering and destroying societal interests, and thus eventually builds a more robust evolution of mankind.
Freedom – redefined – is imperative to the strengthening of the evolution of humanity. Our current laissez-faire version of freedom systematically yields quite the opposite.
