>  Fred Foldvary referred to a "pure free market."   
>  Would he or someone else point to where in the  
literature one can find such a creature explicated?  
> Fred Carstensen  
  
One has to synthesize the concept from several works:  
  
Murray Rothbard.  Man, Economy, and State.  
Henry George. Progress and Poverty.  
David Friedman.  Machinery of Freedom.  
Ludwig von Mises.  Socialism.  
  
Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations included some  
elements of a free market, but his conception was not  
that of a pure free market, in contrast to the above  
theorists who sought to more crisply analyze economic  
freedom.  
  
My recent paper on this is:  
Fred Foldvary.  "Markets Never Fail."  
http://www.foldvary.net/works/mnflv1.html  
  
Encyclopedic references:  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market  
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/FreeMarket.html  
  
> Suggesting I gather that markets are--at least  
> theoretically--not social constructs.  
  
A pure free market is a social construct in one way  
and not in another way.  
  
It is a social construct in that voluntary human  
action presumes that involuntary acts, those with  
victims of coercive harm, can be penalized, and so  
there are laws and institutions prohibiting and  
penalizing coercive harm, as indeed recognized by Adam  
Smith.  
  
But a pure free market is not merely a social  
construct in that the concept of voluntary human  
action is not arbitrary, but is determined by an ethic  
that is based on reason rather than arbitrary social  
whim, as recognized explicitly by Rothbard, George,  
and Locke. Utilitarians such as Mises and Hayek  
implicitly recognized this as well.  
  
Fred Foldvary