Corporate internal markets are well-known as non-free, and when a sufficiently large company is picking and choosing winners in a national economy that's also not a free market.
I think this concept is an exercise in fantasy. There’s simply no such thing as a free market. Why we single out subsidy as non free is arbitrary. What activities constitute legitimate free market behavior? There’s no actual logically sound distinction. The real distinction is “what we do is free market and what our opponents do is not”
> There’s simply no such thing as a free market. Why we single out subsidy as non free is arbitrary. What activities constitute legitimate free market behavior? There’s no actual logically sound distinction.
Sounds like a nirvana fallacy. Yes, nowhere has a perfectly free market, just as nowhere has a perfectly corruptionless justice system and railroad tracks are never perfectly parallel. But there are definitely markets that are less free than others and actions that distort markets further, and it's right to call those out.
