"Free Market" is such a loaded term. What you have are markets of varying degrees of freedom. Not the same thing. :/
@Angle I've been digging into this history for a few years. It's ... interesting.
Adam Smith, BTW, was /not/ a free-market fundie.
Particularly not in the way it's usually spelled out today. Much of what he warned against was /commercial/ overreach by what we'd now call industrial powers.
"Wealth of Nations" was published shortly after the British East India Company stock bubble and crash. That was front-of-mind for Smith.
@Angle It's absolutely ideological. It's also the specific founding premise of numerous organisations and publications, such as The Economist:
"THE ECONOMIST, which will contain— First.—ORIGINAL LEADING ARTICLES, in which free-trade principles will be most rigidly applied to all the important questions of the day... "
http://www.economist.com/node/1873493
At least they're up-front about it. In a stuffed-in-the-archives kind of a way.