That condition of society in which all economic transactions result from voluntary choice without coercion.
[celine]
If a 'market' is a system of exchange, and 'free' means that it is voluntary, that is to say, uncoerced, then a 'free market' is a system in which all voluntary exchanges are permissible and all involuntary exchanges are impermissible.
[bk]
The Market is the sum of all voluntary human action. If one acts non-coercively, one is part of the Market.
New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III
[sek3]
The free market is the name for the array of all the voluntary exchanges that take place in the world.
Murray N. Rothbard, "Toward a Reconstruction of Utility and Welfare Economics" (1956)
[rothbard]
Free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or nontangible services.
[...]
Both parties undertake the exchange because each expects to gain from it. Also, each will repeat the exchange next time (or refuse to) because his expectation has proved correct (or incorrect) in the recent past. Trade, or exchange, is engaged in precisely because both parties benefit; if they did not expect to gain, they would not agree to the exchange.
[...]
In modern game-theory jargon, trade is a win-win situation, a "positive-sum" rather than a "zero-sum" or "negative-sum" game.
[...]
But exchanges are not necessarily free. Many are coerced. If a robber threatens you with "Your money or your life," your payment to him is coerced and not voluntary, and he benefits at your expense. It is robbery, not free markets, that actually follows the mercantilist model: the robber benefits at the expense of the coerced. Exploitation occurs not in the free market, but where the coercer exploits his victim. In the long run, coercion is a negative-sum game that leads to reduced production, saving, and investment, a depleted stock of capital, and reduced productivity and living standards for all, perhaps even for the coercers themselves.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
[rothbard]
A "free market" can represent a spectrum of things to a variety of people. For some, the free market may provide justification for government-issued license to favored corporations to ride roughshod over the common market. To others it may imply "free and fair trade," proponents of which naively expect government to reign in corporate depredations. Somewhere betwixt these two poles fall those who realize that government is to business what steroids are to cattle. Given an injection of big government, corporations grow unnaturally large and aggressive. A market free of help or hindrance by government is the solution least likely to be tried. Too many hands in the tills at either end of the buffet; whether good intentions or self-serving motives run the registers, the results are similar. Policies that protect individual rights can and should also protect corporate rights.
Protectionist policies thwart the action of corrective forces by removing companies from the judgment of the open market. Not judgment by a prescient elite or majority, or by market experts, but by the cumulative force of each freely made individual economic choice acting as the sand in the hourglass.
Reflections on Orwell and Political Language by Cat Farmer
[catfarmer]
First, there is no free market when government artificially restricts the supply of something, be it oil or sugar. In fact, because the U.S. government restricts the importation of sugar into this country in order to protect politically connected domestic sugar producers, we see a two-tiered pricing system: a world price and a U.S. price. While the U.S. price is determined in an open market setting, there is nothing free about it. The political classes have decreed that U.S. residents are going to pay higher prices for sugar than people do elsewhere.
The Oil Dependency Myth, by Willliam L. Anderson
[williamAnderson]