My take is beyond economic activity to enable the biological survival of the species, our economics are historically built on gossip and political whimsy. I suspect there are many fewer rules needed than we’ve been lead to believe.

We like to believe it must be complicated because of course society is. But social laws are based on social network effects which are politically manipulated.

So in conclusion, it’s rhetorically a free market but in practical terms it’s gamed by social corruption as usual, requiring ever more Byzantine economic theory to capture the edge cases.

Infinitely big little numbers have allowed economists to iterate on the edge, but socially it’s belly button digging.