The Letter

Dear Government,

I think I may have been exposed to a cult. Or an extremist ideology. Or possibly a pyramid scheme. I’m not sure which, but I need your help.

Last weekend, I was at a neighborhood barbecue when a man I’d never met — he said his name was “Ron” — started talking to me about something called “the free market.” At first I thought he was describing a new grocery store that gives away food for free (which sounded lovely). But as he kept talking, I realized he was describing something far more radical.

According to Ron, in a “free market,” prices for goods and services are determined by something called “supply and demand” rather than by a panel of qualified government economists. People just… buy and sell things… at whatever price they agree on. Without a committee. Without oversight. Without anyone in a lanyard approving the transaction.

I felt dizzy. I had to sit down.

Ron went on to say that in a “free market,” if a business provides bad service, customers simply stop buying from it, and it goes away on its own — without a single regulatory agency shutting it down. He called this “competition.” He said it with a straight face.

I left the barbecue early. I’ve been inside ever since, with the curtains drawn, watching government press conferences on a loop. But I can’t stop thinking about what Ron said. What if he’s right? What if prices could be set without a committee? What if businesses could regulate themselves?

I’m scared, Government. Tell me Ron is wrong. Tell me the free market is a myth. Tell me we need the committees.

Shaken and Stirred in Seattle

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The Response

Dear Shaken and Stirred in Seattle,

First things first: you are safe now. You are writing to a government advice column, which means you have voluntarily placed yourself back within the warm, protective perimeter of institutional authority. Whatever Ron told you at that barbecue cannot hurt you here. This is a regulation-positive space.

Now let me address your question directly: Is the free market a cult?

Not technically. A cult requires charismatic leadership, ritualistic behavior, and the isolation of members from mainstream society. The free market ideology has all of these things — its charismatic leaders are called “economists,” its rituals include something called “Black Friday,” and its adherents are definitely isolated from mainstream society (they’re the ones at barbecues cornering strangers to talk about supply curves). But the government has not officially classified it as a cult, because doing so would require acknowledging that it exists, and we’ve been trying very hard to pretend it doesn’t.

What the free market is, officially, is a fringe economic ideology — a set of beliefs held by a small but vocal group of people who think the economy can function without the guiding hand of government regulators, committees, czars, commissioners, and that one guy at the FTC who decides whether your shampoo bottle is lying about “volumizing.”

Let me walk you through the key claims of free market ideology, explain why each one is dangerous nonsense, and provide you with the tools to resist this kind of radical thinking in the future.

What Free Market Believers Actually Claim

The free market ideology rests on several core beliefs that, to the uninitiated, may sound reasonable. This is what makes it so dangerous. The most effective fringe ideologies are the ones that sound like common sense until a government expert explains why they’re wrong.

Claim #1: Prices should be set by “supply and demand.”

Free market believers assert that prices should be determined by how much of something is available (supply) and how much people want it (demand). Under this theory, if there’s a lot of something and nobody wants it, the price goes down. If there’s very little of something and everyone wants it, the price goes up. No committee. No approval process. No 47-page pricing impact assessment. Just… math.

Why this is dangerous: If prices are set by supply and demand, then nobody is in charge of prices. Nobody is making sure the price is “fair.” Nobody is holding hearings about whether $4.50 is too much for a gallon of milk. Nobody is convening a bipartisan commission to investigate the price of eggs. The entire pricing ecosystem would just… work on its own, which would put approximately 340,000 government pricing regulators out of work. That’s 340,000 families, Shaken. Think about the families.

Dr. Claudia Central-Planning, Director of the Institute for Supervised Economics, explains:

“Supply and demand is a nice theory, the way ‘everyone just be nice to each other’ is a nice theory. In practice, prices need to be set by qualified experts who have spent years studying economics and have absolutely no experience running a business. That’s how you get balanced, rational pricing that only occasionally results in shortages, surpluses, and bread lines.”

Claim #2: Businesses regulate themselves through “competition.”

Ron apparently told you that in a free market, bad businesses fail because customers choose better alternatives. This is called “competition,” and free market believers treat it like some kind of magical self-correcting mechanism.

Why this is dangerous: If businesses regulate themselves, what are regulators supposed to do? The federal government employs approximately 2.9 million people, a significant portion of whom are dedicated to regulating businesses. The idea that businesses could simply behave well because customers demand it — without a single inspector, auditor, compliance officer, or guy with a clipboard — is not just economically naive. It is an existential threat to the regulatory workforce.

Besides, the idea that consumers can make good decisions on their own is frankly insulting to the millions of government employees whose entire job is to make decisions for them. Do you know how to evaluate the thread count of your bedsheets? The structural integrity of your toaster? The appropriate sugar content of your breakfast cereal? Of course you don’t. That’s why we have the Federal Bedsheet Advisory Board, the Consumer Toaster Safety Commission, and the Interagency Cereal Sweetness Task Force. Without them, you’d be sleeping on sandpaper, using an exploding toaster, and eating cereal that’s too sweet. Is that the world you want, Shaken?

Claim #3: Government intervention creates “unintended consequences.”

This is perhaps the most offensive claim in the free market playbook. Adherents argue that when the government intervenes in the economy — through regulations, price controls, subsidies, tariffs, mandates, or any of the other 40,000 tools in its economic toolkit — it often produces results that are the opposite of what was intended. They call these “unintended consequences,” as if the government doesn’t intend every consequence.

Why this is dangerous: Acknowledging unintended consequences would mean admitting that government planners are fallible, which is obviously impossible. Government planners attended the best universities, sat on the most important committees, and have access to the most sophisticated economic models, which are accurate roughly 50% of the time (which, if you think about it, is better than a coin flip, or at least equal to one). The suggestion that their interventions could backfire is not just wrong — it’s rude.

The Government’s Official Position on Markets

The government’s official position on markets is nuanced, thoughtful, and can be summarized in six words: “Supervised, regulated, and charged a fee.”

Markets are allowed to exist. The government is not a monster. People can buy and sell things. But every transaction should ideally involve at least one government agency, one permit, one tax, and one compliance officer standing nearby with a knowing look on their face. This is what economists call a “mixed economy,” which is like a “free market” but with the freedom removed and replaced with licensing requirements.

Gerald Governance, Undersecretary of the Bureau of Economic Supervision, puts it plainly:

“We don’t oppose markets. We oppose free markets. A market without government oversight is like a child without a babysitter — technically functional, but likely to stick a fork in an electrical socket. Our job is to be the babysitter. The fact that the babysitter charges $3.7 trillion a year and occasionally locks the child in its room is beside the point.”

Deprogramming: Recovering from Free Market Exposure

Now, let’s talk about your recovery. You’ve been exposed to free market ideology, and while a single barbecue conversation is unlikely to cause permanent damage, we need to make sure the ideas don’t take root.

The Bureau of Ideological Health offers a free (well, taxpayer-funded) deprogramming program called “Markets Are Not Magic: Returning to Regulatory Reality” (MANM:RRR). The program includes:

Week 1: Identifying the Lies. Participants review common free market claims and practice identifying the flaws using government-approved talking points. For example, when a free market believer says “competition drives innovation,” the approved response is: “Government grants drive innovation. Competition drives anxiety.”

Week 2: Understanding Regulatory Love. Participants visit government regulatory agencies and observe the dedicated men and women who spend their careers writing rules about things nobody asked them to write rules about. The goal is to develop emotional attachment to the regulatory process, similar to how one develops emotional attachment to a very slow, very expensive pet.

Week 3: Exposure Therapy (Controlled). Under careful supervision, participants are exposed to small doses of free market thinking — a brief passage from Adam Smith, a Milton Friedman interview clip, a menu from a food truck that somehow exists without a commercial kitchen — and practice dismissing each one with the phrase “That only works in theory.” This is the government’s all-purpose rebuttal to any idea it hasn’t tried, and it works beautifully because it can never be disproven.

Week 4: Community Reintegration. Participants are reintroduced to normal society with a new set of conversational tools. When someone mentions the free market, they now know to respond with:

• “That’s an interesting perspective. Have you considered regulations?”
• “I used to think that too, before I learned about the Federal Register.”
• “I’d love to discuss this further, but I need to go file something.”
• Simply walking away while murmuring “externalities” under your breath

Support Groups for Free-Market Exposure

If you’re struggling to process your barbecue encounter, consider joining one of the following support groups:

Regulated and Proud (RAP): A weekly group for citizens recovering from exposure to free market ideas. Members share stories (“My uncle sent me a Thomas Sowell book”), offer support (“I deleted it from my Kindle without reading it”), and practice affirmations (“I don’t need to understand the economy; the government understands it for me”).

Survivors of Libertarian Encounters (SOLE): A specialized group for citizens who have had direct contact with self-identified libertarians. Members process the trauma of conversations that included phrases like “taxation is theft,” “the government that governs best governs least,” and “have you read The Road to Serfdom?” SOLE meetings always begin with a moment of silence for lost productivity.

Parents of Free Market Youth (PFMY): For parents whose children have been radicalized by free market thinking, often through exposure to lemonade stands, Minecraft economies, or that one econ professor. Meetings feature guest speakers from the Bureau of Youth Ideological Compliance who explain how to redirect your child’s entrepreneurial energy toward government-approved activities, such as volunteering for a regulatory agency or starting a compliance consulting firm.

A Word About Ron

You should know that “Ron” is almost certainly not his real name. Free market proselytizers often use aliases at social gatherings to avoid being reported to the Bureau of Ideological Health. If you see Ron at another barbecue, do not engage. Do not make eye contact. And under no circumstances should you let him explain what a “Laffer Curve” is, because once you understand the Laffer Curve, you start asking uncomfortable questions about tax rates, and once you start asking about tax rates, you’re basically lost to us.

If you’d like to report Ron, you can file an Ideological Exposure Incident Report (Form IEIR-5) with your local Bureau of Ideological Health office. Include Ron’s physical description, the approximate duration of your conversation, and whether he used the phrase “invisible hand” at any point. (If he did, that’s a Class B violation. The government’s official position is that the only invisible hand in the economy is the government’s, and it’s not invisible — it’s just buried under 175,000 pages of regulations.)

In Closing

Shaken and Stirred in Seattle, I know the barbecue was frightening. Encountering a free market believer in the wild — at a social gathering, no less, where you had no regulatory agency to hide behind — is a disorienting experience. But take comfort in this: the free market is not coming for you. The government has spent decades building a regulatory infrastructure so vast, so complex, and so thoroughly embedded in every aspect of economic life that a truly free market is about as likely as a DMV that runs on time.

Ron may dream of a world where people buy and sell freely, where prices are set by mutual agreement, and where the government doesn’t insert itself into every transaction. But we live in the real world — a world of permits, regulations, fees, inspections, oversight committees, and bipartisan commissions on the price of eggs.

And isn’t that beautiful?

With the comforting weight of a regulatory framework that will never, ever let you make your own economic decisions,

Dr. Grant Funding Senior Economic Deprogramming Specialist Bureau of Ideological Health, Market Skepticism Division “The Only Good Market Is a Supervised Market”