Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. Any market in which trade is unregulated; an economic system free from government intervention.
Wikipedia
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. It is a result of a need being, then the need being met. A free market contrasts with a regulated market, in which government intervenes in supply and demand through non-market methods such as laws creating barriers to market entry or price fixing. In a free-market economy, prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy, and it typically entails support for highly competitive markets and private ownership of productive enterprises.
Although free markets are commonly associated with capitalism within a market economy in contemporary usage and popular culture, free markets have also been advocated by free-market anarchists, market socialists, and some proponents of cooperatives and advocates of profit sharing.
Usage examples of "free market".
He would surely applaud my enterprise in the buccaneering spirit of the free market.
Apple therefore had a monopoly on hardware that could run MacOS, whereas Windows-compatible hardware came out of a free market.
The free market seems to have decided that people will not pay for cool-looking computers.
Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.
The problem with interacting with the free market, Rudy always said, is that we manufacture shit.
Once conditions exist here for a free market, it will be like watering the ground.
Whereas they welcome currently lower prices on produce and greater assurances of its variety and quantities, they also tend to regret the withdrawal or loss of the local peasantry, which provided them not only with a plethora of individual suppliers, tending to generate a free market, complex and competitive, but also with a sphere of intelligence and even defense about the city.
Whereas they welcome currently lower prices on produce and greater assurances of its variety and quantities, they also tend (304) to regret the withdrawal or loss of the local peasantry, which provided them not only with a plethora of individual suppliers, tending to generate a free market, complex and competitive, but also with a sphere of intelligence and even defense about the city.