One thing that is curious to me is that the "free market" appears to only be "free" once you've amassed a certain amount of capital, which you can then expend to defend your enterprise from any number of legal challenges (some spurious, some real) and also comply with any number of governmental regulations (some spurious, some real). Even so, it's not so much that I distrust the phrase "free market" as it is that I think that for whatever reason, we, common Americans, are not allowed to take advantage of the "free market". Many "anti-capitalist" Americans haven't even ever experienced anything close to a "free market".

At the billionaire level, it's easy to think about the relative successes of SpaceX and Blue Origin; as they are held privately, they can hire, fire, and structure themselves without worrying about federal regulations or shareholder obligations. That is, of course, the only reliable way to get yourself into a footing that permits innovation past the status quo. These companies are, in a sense, proving that the "free market" can act on the aerospace industry to drive down prices (cost of a Falcon Launch or a Starlink connection) and to increase technical capacity at a brutal pace (Starship projections on mass-to-orbit). But the cavernous pockets of their billionaire owners also protect them from the rest of the "market", by which I mean their competitors waging corporate and legal warfare against them.

My primary complaint about the status quo of the US market, i.e. "only-billionaires-get-to-seriously-push-the-needle-in-innovation" really makes more sense when one considers the price of medical supplies. The EpiPen costs $500 for what I bet is less than $10 in materials and labor, even counting the strict standards its manufacturers are obliged to conform to in terms of batch creation and ingredients tracking. (A piece of metal in the aerospace industry is always more expensive than a piece of metal in the residential construction industry because it must always be possible to trace its pedigree.)

But surely the chemical process to manufacture epinephrine is easily known, and the injection molding and assembly techniques needed to make and inspect the EpiPen is trivial in a modern supply chain that can provide OLED TVs for a pittance. So why don't we have two dozen scrappy American firms competing against Pfizer's Meridian Medical Technologies to produce adrenaline auto-injectors? Does it really take a billionaire to make a company that can produce a product that can actually cause the "free market" to act on the prices of emergency allergy medication? It certainly feels that way, especially when the main out-of-pocket pharmaceutical supplier that appears to be to putting a dent in out-of-pocket medicine pricing is... GoodRx, owned by Mark Cuban.

I may have gotten some of the details wrong, but I believe the principles about which I allude to are accurate: even thought the "free market" is indeed a civilization-defining socioeconomic technology that helped give America its exceptional power, the market is not free unless you are a billionaire. It would be nice if Bezos' new Washington Post Opinion column was focused on extending the benefits of the "free market" back down to the masses, as it was in some industries during some eras of American history, but somehow I doubt that will be the case.