What Do You Think "Free Market Economy" Means?

It means not just the right to set your own prices, but the right to sell to whatever country you want and also for the countries to sell what they want to you. It means not having a monopoly on one product. For instance, the gas prices. They are not in the free market system because the prices of oil per barrel and gas is therefore set by a monopoly. Of course if you set your own price, you have to set it low enough to get customers and for the customers to be able to live in a reasonable standard of living. Otherwise it is greed and if one is greedy, one gets a bad reputation.

A free market economy would be one in which all regulation was absent, including the protectionism practised by US. If you want to know what a free market economy looks like, consider Victorian England, a tiny, tiny minority live in splendour the overwhelming majority in abject and utter poverty and near starvation. From that evil that is the free market was born those brave heroes and martyrs of the British Labour movement that won humane treatment for workers in UK and which spread to other places in the world, so that many now enjoy, safe working conditions and wages sufficient to feed themselves. Let us pray that God spares us from a return to the unGodliness of a free market economy all the best, urban

We tackled this in our economics class and unfortunately, there is not such thing as an absolute free market. Some might be close to such yet having an absolute trait is inexistent, specially when in terms of gas-prices because not all companies and individuals can really produce such because its really a scarce resource that is being monopolized by few entities.

In a sense, yes. In a free market economy people should be able to set prices as high or as low as they want. But in reality no market is 100% free, just as there is no such thing as pure capitalism, socialism, competition etc. And speaking of competition, this is something that hides behind the reason why people cannot set prices as high or as low as they want. Regardless of whether a market is free or not, it is also either competitive or not. In a non-competitive market there is one or very few firms providing a product. The lack of competition would allow them to raise prices as high as they want but the state, fortunately, doesn't allow them to take advantage of this monopolistic, or oligopolistic, power at the cost of the consumer. If it didn't do this, it would lead to an even bigger gap between the rich and the poor than we have today. In my opinion a free market economy allows firms non-discriminatory access to a certain market. This also isn't the case everywhere but like I said, there isn't such a thing as a pure free market, there are rules and restrictions.

Yes, it means that you can set things at a price you want, and people can buy it at whatever prices are available. Basically, supply and demand, as well as competing companies are what makes this economy work. No way would it work if every company in each specific sector had a monopoly in that sector. Prices would be too high for peoples' wages, and no competition would not be very fun for us.

Freedom has some limitations. Freedom doesn't means that you can do everything and you can buy everything. Freedom means You can do many things with certain circumstance. Their should be some limitations of freedom also. Limited actions make our society good.

I think the important price to consider here is "the kind of product" that we are talking about. Gas is a "necessity" and its demand is highly inelastic - which means even with an increase in price of gas, its demand will not decrease. So, if the government will not regulate the gas price, and allow the company to set the prices, company can set very high prices for the gas without having any significant decrease in the consumption. That is why even in a "free market economy" there are certain products that have to be regulated and these are mainly the necessary products like medicines, petroleum products etc