Economists back the concept of the free market as an efficient economic system, in spite of the many occasions when economists admit to "market failure". Economists have created a plausible model in which a "free market economy" causes the creation of an economic position in which nobody can be made better off without making someone worse off. However, when attention is paid to the way this theory is obtained, we find that it requires many assumptions to hold true.

If any one of the assumptions economics require to prove the economic efficiency of "free markets" fails, then the proof fails. Economists won't tell you, but many of the assumptions fail, making the justification for economists promoting this particular model wrong, politically biassed, and unprofessional.

A selection of four of the nine or so assumptions for the free market efficiency model are: 1) Complete information is available, 2) there are no external economies or diseconomies, 3) full employment is assumed throughout, and 4) there is a given state of technical knowledge.

Business and government constantly keep us away from "complete information" by the constant demand for commercial confidentiality. This secrecy prevents consumers from making rational decisions. This prevents the "free market" working efficiently. Economists do not campaign for the denial of commercial confidentiality in order to make their free market theory valid. Commerce has always resisted disclosure of full details of their products. Commerce makes use of public relations experts to disguise the truth and project somewhat false information. No rational decisions can be made in the absence of full knowledge of products and their alternatives.

Secondly, there are very significant external costs put upon people by business. Businesses in reality, try to externalise costs onto the public as much as possible. The political reaction over hundreds of years has been to produce regulations to slow down the externalisation of costs on to the public by the businesses that find ever new ways to diddle the consumers and put new costs onto the public. This is why business campaigns so hard for deregulation. They want the public to bear as many of their costs as they can. As a condition for economic efficiency, the need for businesses to internalise all their costs is not met.

Next, full employment has not existed in NZ for some time and unemployment is rife throughout the world. This makes the theory faulty. The existence of significant unemployment is exploited by employers to reduce workers purchasing power. They seem to forget that if every business was able to reduce their employment significantly there would be fewer people to sell their products to.

Fourthly, of all human existence, the last period of time has been dominated by constant scientific discoveries and technological improvement so that there is constant change in what products are available in the "free market" and how they are made. It becomes very difficult for people to maintain their economic equilibrium in the face of constant change. This requirement for the validity of the theory is not met.

The support for the "free market" is ideologically based, not scientifically based.