The definition of 'free market' that you're using cannot exist. It's not possible for a market to be both completely free from interference for buyers/sellers and free from all forms of economic privilege/monopoly/artificial scarcity.
It sure can.
Consider my own decision on whether to DIY my deck gate or farm it out to a handyman. The decision comes down to about $500 difference in cost on one side, additional tools and skills I will gain on the other side. I don't see any economic-priviledge/monopoly or artificial scarcity. I don't see why it is not an ideal free market when you keep it small - to a single participant in this specific case.
In any non-trivial, macro market, I'd agree with you because then I will need to take into account the handyman's earnings, his bargaining position over mine etc. and we can't really have a true free market. In fact, as soon as you have two participants - we move away from the ideal.
We have a free market. I buy up all the potatoes in all the stores in my country.
Then you have monopoly. This == big deviation from free market in my definition.
If the government steps in to prevent this, we no longer have a free market because I'm not free to buy potatoes. If they don't, we have artificial scarcity of potatoes.
The confusion only exists if you consider "free market" a black and white, binary construct. How about: ideal free market never exists, but different actions impact it towards or away from it. Government action is a negative impact on free markets, but then eliminating monopoly is positive. So, government action may, in the end, be a net positive for free market.
It's possible to optimize for a free market, or it's possible to prevent artificial scarcity. It's not possible to have both simultaneously.
Very true for any non-trivial market.
And yet no excuse to subscribe to a over-simplified partisan definition of free markets.
If you have a truly free market, I should be free to buy slaves if I want. If I'm prevented from doing this by an external force, then you don't have a free market - it's limited and controlled.
1. We've already established you can (almost?) never have a truly free market in any non-trivial, multi-actor market.
2. You only need to quantify weigh "your control over the slaves" vs. the "government control over you to not have slaves". Pick the one that makes for the "free'est" market for ALL the market participants - slaves included.
It is all rhetoric at the end of the day. Economists don't use the construct of "free market" in their papers - because it is a confusing one. They use mathematical constructs like Pareto Efficiency, Gini Coefficient etc. [I'm no PhD in Econ. So point out contrary data if you know any and I will correct my position.] So this confusion does not arise in serious literature to this extent. The issue came only in how laypeople translated those esoteric models into common rhetoric.