We don't really have a free market. We have a market that is heavily regulated to suit certain parties, some sections are heavily subsidized to suit certain parties, and most businesses are heavily controlled to suit certain parties.

If you are in an industry that doesn't have some kind of government-instigated 'parity', you have more leverage. That's nice, but not all that common these days. YOU may be part of a free market with your job, but everything you buy with the proceeds from that job is affected by ongoing inflation. You may think you're immune, but I don't think you are, you just make enough money where your income still exceeds your outgo. Just because you add zeros to your income, you're not really keeping up with the zeros that are added to all your living costs. What is happening to the money that is (for instance) being put into savings accounts or invested? Every week the numbers in the accounts may increase, but the real value of that money has decreased. You've lost money as it sits in the bank or the stock market.

And the average worker is an employee, not an independent contractor. An employee is heavily controlled, is usually fairly easily replaced, and with today's economy there's a long line of people ready to step into his job for a lower wage than what he is being paid.

You can kind of smirk that you are better off than an employee, but you are still subsidizing his employer's industry when you buy his products. It isn't like you have the choice of only buying everything from independent contractors, is it?

I doubt that we would be allowed to go back to anything even resembling a free market even if we had a major crash. The controllers have us pretty much in an iron grip, and have done so for many, many years (this is nothing recent, just fine-tuned). But our economy (and the world's) is like a large rock on a long, thin stick that isn't stuck into the ground very securely. A little more wind, a little bit of earth movement....

Sue