> 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