All markets are free at inception, and no markets are free in practice. Why do you think this is?

A few ways to suppress competition, off the top of my head?
Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof strongarms retailers into not carrying competitors products.

Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof pays off widget manufacturers to not provide widgets to competitors.

Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof simply buys and buries competitors, disruptive technologies, whatever.

Free market with patents (antithetical concepts?): Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof refuses to license patents to competitors.

Free market without patents (this has too many problems to enumerate, but just picking one): Espionage. R&D is squandered when a competitor steals your trade secrets/reverse engineers your products, sells it for a pittance.

Price dumping. Dominant corporation(s) or collusion thereof with large cash reserves simply prices upstarts out of the market.

This list is just off the cuff, is by no means exhaustive, ignores other things like:

1) "Natural" monopolies (utilities, roads, railways, etc.)
2) Restriction of information/prevention of rational, informed consumers
a) Side note: In a free market, this is the only place you can go to for environmental protection, avoidance of the tragedy of the commons.

Edit: Okay, I may have overstated my case. Very small-scale interpersonal markets can be free. That farmer's market that's too small to attract the big guys, that's pretty free. There's a scale at which it collapses, though.

Repeat after me:

There's no such thing as a free market.
There's no such thing as a free market.
There's no such thing as a free market.

Free markets rely on rational, informed consumers. Any dominant player in a free market would inhibit both of these things. Free markets depend on the possibility for competition to arise. There are a million ways for a dominant player in a free market to quash competition before it can get a foothold.

Free markets are self-destructive by their nature. They're unstable systems.

*promote

Well, you see, he goes birling down a-down the white water...

In a society where you expect the children to never leave their home communities and where their future education and job are predestined by where they live, that might make sense. I don't want that kind of stratification. That opens up situations where Bible belter children are never exposed to evolution (for an easy target), or where some district just up and decided that heck, their kids never need to learn long division.

The ideal is a society that's much more fluid than that, and the reality is that this is a world where not only are the children from rural Arkansas going to be competing with the ones from NYC for colleges and jobs, but with people from all over the world. Kids can already be extremely hampered just because of where they went to school, which is what the CC (I'm assuming good intentions) was supposed to help. Obviously it is not doing a good job, but I think it's a matter of implementation rather than the idea itself.

I think it's actually not water. That's open air.

Obligatory.

Six hundred dollars. That's how much the bag in the video costs.

I thought the argument was that he shouldn't be legitimizing the reign of a totalitarian dictator in the first place by being so buddy-buddy with him. But since he's there and has the guy's ear...

The Financial Times readership averages 67%. I am shocked, SHOCKED!

42% here.

Edit: This is a pretty poorly put together quiz, though. It's kinda worse than meaningless, the way it's structured.

I think our military should play more music.

That's pretty much what all cats are doing when they're rubbing against you, though.

This was my thought.

He never really says that it's an MMO per se. He repeatedly avoided the question. The suggestion of persistence and "everyone in the same universe" could have some different interpretations. Fingers-crossed that if it's an MMO it's nothing like any ever made.

You're so edgy.