As it turns out, I'm not making up my own definitions here. The view of a free market being a market with equitable access is attributable to Adam Smith from his Wealth of Nations. He bases his understanding of this freedom on the absence of private rent-seeking and absence of monopoly privilege (though in 1700's vernacular).
Henry George in his Progress and Poverty makes similar gestures toward defining a free market this way.
Part of the reason why it's important to consider other definitions (and other economic models) is that there is an important result in economics from the 1970's that, more or less, establishes the lack of a guarantee that the demand curve in an aggregate demand model (a macroeconomic model) will slope downward. This makes the aggregate demand model less than useful for a priori arguments about supply and demand in the macro context; they must instead be approached a posteriori.
It's also the big reason why I'm uninterested in a colloquial definition that is heavily filtered through von Mises and Friedman.
Henry George in his Progress and Poverty makes similar gestures toward defining a free market this way.
Part of the reason why it's important to consider other definitions (and other economic models) is that there is an important result in economics from the 1970's that, more or less, establishes the lack of a guarantee that the demand curve in an aggregate demand model (a macroeconomic model) will slope downward. This makes the aggregate demand model less than useful for a priori arguments about supply and demand in the macro context; they must instead be approached a posteriori.
It's also the big reason why I'm uninterested in a colloquial definition that is heavily filtered through von Mises and Friedman.