Free-market explanations fail because markets are social institutions shaped by state power and discrimination

Evidence

[T]he road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism… . Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system. Thus even those who wished most ardently to free the state from all unnecessary duties, and whose whole philosophy demanded the restriction of state activities, could not but entrust the state with new powers, organs and instruments required for the establishment of laissez faire. (1957, 140) By the later 1980s, when the MPS members began to smell the tang of victory, they felt free to internally discuss an irony that they could not freely admit out at the nether layers of their Russian Doll: Among our members, there are some who are able to imagine a viable society without a state. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2137 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

“Free market” explanations, however, are notoriously incomplete. As others have persuasively argued, markets are social institutions shaped by various levels of state and private control. Choices and preferences made in the “market” domain are, as Cass Sunstein explains, “endogenous rather than exogenous”—a function of current information, consumption patterns, existing legal rules, social norms, and culture. For instance, the historical and present reality of race discrimination in the housing market inevitably affects individual preferences and mobility in the housing arena. Given this history and present reality, the “free” nature of market choices must be called into question. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 317 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The rise of right-wing, racist movements and parties, including those that aim to entrench rather than ameliorate the inequalities of the neoliberal period, suggests that the project of subordinating politics to human rights norms and transferring governance to international financial bodies has failed to create more inclusive and equal polities. The insistence that freedom requires submission to the market, and the acceptance of the inequalities it produces, has led neither to equality nor to freedom. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 457 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The market-dynamics explanation lacks conclusive empirical support yet is repeatedly invoked to deny racism; Housing-market discrimination makes purportedly free market choices illusory — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 317; Subordinating politics to markets failed to produce either freedom or equality — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 457 (+3 more)

Related

• Subordinating politics to markets failed to produce either freedom or equality (similarity 0.82)
• The free market requires constant state interventionism to be established and maintained (similarity 0.79)
• Housing-market discrimination makes purportedly free market choices illusory (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Housing-market discrimination makes purportedly free market choices illusory #corroborates (0.85) — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 317
• The free market requires constant state interventionism to be established and maintained #corroborates (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2137
• Subordinating politics to markets failed to produce either freedom or equality #expands (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 457
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600
• The meritocratic promise of market society disguised its classist foundations. #corroborates (0.72) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1571