Free Market — Like Free Jazz — Tolerable in Principle.

King Banaian joins the Westover-Quimby colloquy with what I hope is a joke.

Advertising Age reports that the free market is doing a very fine job in fixing potholes, at least in Louisville.

Don't be surprised if you see Col. Sanders out filling potholes. In an unusual cause-marketing push, KFC is tackling the pothole problem in Louisville, Ky. in exchange for stamping the fresh pavement with "Re-freshed by KFC," a chalky stencil likely to fade away in the next downpour.

Or perhaps economists — rational actors, and all that — don't stoop to study how marketing and promotion play in the free market. This is not "fine" problem-solving on any supportable and ongoing scale. It's just a stunt to get national media attention.

Then he conflates an NGO that relies in part on maximizing government subsidies to help kids get breakfast with the free market in action. I guess the free market is defined as whatever reinforces a free market point.

Finally, there's this.

The fact is that government cannot produce a single breakfast unless it removes the value of that breakfast from someone else. It's not just lunch that there is no free production of; it applies to the other meals of the day. It can only choose to do so by deciding that someone's breakfast is worth more to society than someone else's breakfast.

Well, Wal-Mart cannot sell a single can of corn unless it removes the value of that can of corn from another local business. When our elected government does it, King & Co. call it theft. When we "vote" on this transfer as consumers, it's the free market at work, regardless of any behind-the-scenes extortion.

I'm for the free market in principle, but it's like free jazz. You wouldn't want to listen to it all the time.

For the Banaians and Westovers, though, it's not really free unless businesses can set rivers on fire, exploit labor, fill your chicken with hormones and then declare bankruptcy if too many people squawk. Because, you know, it'll all work out in the end.

King and I will never agree on this, but we can have the discussion. I'll leave the animated gifs to my friend Spot.