I took a great macro econ class from the author of Prices and Choices in 1986 or -7 at HSPH, and he said, and I will always remember this formulation, that the benefits of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' of a free market have just 3 simple pre-requisites. The simple requirements EVERY American defender of a free market should know, inside out, are:

1) product choices (a variety of competing products in a niche)

2) informed consumers (who know key distinguishing attributes of the products), and

3) consumers acting rationally in their own best interest.

These conditions don't need to be perfect, just substantially the case.

However, these 3 things are the absolute LAST THING that any typical, self-serving laissez-faire capitalist wants.

US CAPITALISM FIGHTS the existence of a true free market, tooth and nail:

1) it seeks monopoly (and proprietary horizontal & vertical integration) at every opportunity and in every niche, and failing that, colludes on price, and failing both, commits fraud (disinformation, disinfotainment), to PREVENT actual product choice competition. A fair market is an unstable condition that strongly tends toward monopoly. One cannot obtain, nor keep a free market without a responsive and strong regulatory regime in governance. US Corporations are required both by law and stockholders to maximize their profits, and do so to the best of their ability. They will attempt to buy congress and law, capture regulators, increase in size, influence judges, and misinform the press & public, and therefore...

2) it invests in enormous advertising budgets, sufficient to sell refrigerators to Eskimos, or in Steve Bannon's phrase 'fill the channel with shit' or in Plato's phrase, 'to make the worse appear the better cause' (this last was part of the City of Athens' 'trumped' up indictment of Socrates - perhaps we should make hemlock available to the billionaires, CEO's, and presidents who ACTUALLY do this?). US Capitalism abhors an informed consumer! Even major corporations with a popular product (winning in a free market is never assurance one will continue to win) will pull out all stops (&undercut all regulations) to misinform! (Correct information IS fungible power, and leaving power with the consumer is an anathema to 'proper' self-interested corporations.)

3) it uses said misinformation in a cynical manner to trigger EMOTIVE human choices in domains where consumer choice does still exist. It overtly uses sex ('sex sells'), fear, appetite, addiction, love, even humor, and increasingly AI-targeted & individually informed misinformation, to steer the non-rational behaviors of those they have observed to have responded in desired ways in the past (via the Attention & Surveillance Capitalism Economy - to which we all have clicked "I Agree").

One only needs to see the growing misanthropy, objectification, obesity, addictions, amoral transactionalism, social isolation, dishonesty, and distrust in American society, to understand US Capitalism is playing what Simon Sinek calls a 'Finite strategy in an Infinite Game'. We are 'misinformation-marks'; we are rarely rational consumers. This extraction via misinformation does not scale as a civilization. There will be no winners here. This does not get prettier with greater consolidation of power.

o To summarize, US Capitalism exists in direct conflict with free markets.

o The capacity to control a market is related to the size of a corporation.

o Democracy and good governance can't co-exist with a billionaire class.

IF one has the money to buy / own information streams that half the nation consumes, or if one can buy 3/4 of congress with petty cash, one can always 'win', without risking free market competition on merit.

This is the kind of world that the kind of person who needs to be a billionaire, needs to have, and in my view increasingly does have.

Again, democracy, free markets, and billionaires are incompatible.