Pretty much no market in existence is completely "free," but this is a pretty limited view of things.
Is there nothing free about the market for software because only Adobe can sell Photoshop? Presumably then there are also no free markets for, well, any type of cultural product. In a sense that's true and Disney is the only game in town for Rogue One, but I'm not sure it's a terribly useful analytical framework.
"Monopolies are not free markets" is also an interesting claim on its own.
> Is there nothing free about the market for software because only Adobe can sell Photoshop? Presumably then there are also no free markets for, well, any type of cultural product. In a sense that's true and Disney is the only game in town for Rogue One, but I'm not sure it's a terribly useful analytical framework.
Rather than a binary it's probably best to think about the extent to which one thing is a substitute for another. Photoshop is a tool, and there's no fundamental reason a competitor couldn't make a program that does the same things; to that extent, there's a free market in image editors. To the extent that there are things that you can't substitute (e.g. plugins that use a photoshop-specific API), there isn't a free market there - it's not black and white, rather there's an extent to which the market approximates a free one. Is Star Trek a substitute for Firefly? To a certain extent yes, but probably less than the Photoshop alternatives.
> "Monopolies are not free markets" is also an interesting claim on its own.
Huh? That's completely standard, established economics. ("Free market" is an economic term of art that doesn't always mean what it sounds like).
Ehh, the idea that Monopolies are not free markets, is a fairly well understood separation.
"A free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are determined by the open market and consumers, in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market
The idea is Monopolies can extract "Monopoly Rent/Economic Rent" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent at a higher price than normal because competitors don't enter the market and lower prices.
Is there nothing free about the market for software because only Adobe can sell Photoshop? Presumably then there are also no free markets for, well, any type of cultural product. In a sense that's true and Disney is the only game in town for Rogue One, but I'm not sure it's a terribly useful analytical framework.
"Monopolies are not free markets" is also an interesting claim on its own.