In a blatant attempt to generate buzz for my latest book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies, just out in paperback, I’m going to do a numbered list, the kind that BuzzFeed excels at. I’m going to describe nine reasons why the free market is a false concept. And to further the suspense, I’m going to do one new reason every few days, until I have nine.

Nine is an arbitrary number. Could do 11, or 14 or 27. But nine allows me to hit the high points.

I will start from the outside in, going from reasons that are less important to most important. And here’s why the subject is so important to me:  my book posits that government creates markets, and calls for a more public and democratic conversation about their creation. Standing in the way of this conversation is a big brick wall called “the Free Market,” which must either be knocked down or climbed over.

So without further ado, here we go.

 Reason Number One that the free market is a false concept:

Roads. From the National Road that Congress authorized soon after the country’s founding, to the average pot-holed street that a county or city builds and takes care of, roads have been central to life in these United States, and indeed, in almost every country. And with roads, there has from the beginning been an acknowledgement that business can’t do the job by itself; that only government can build a system that can be open to all, and connect to a maximum of places with a minimum of inefficiencies. Sure there have been some private toll roads, but they have worked, and this is rare, only in places where access is limited and users have little choice but to take the tolled route. So going back to at least ancient Rome, where the state built thousands of miles of good paved roads around its empire, governments have made it a priority to build linear connections on the ground between places. The market, to use a term I don’t support, does not do it. Instead, governments build roads, and that creates markets.

Roads is a good stand in for all transportation, which government has long been at the forefront in. Government in the United States has taken the lead in canals (the canal era in the early 19^th century), trains (the immense subsidies, grants and rights given to private companies in the mid to late 19^th century), air travel (cities and states built airports all over the place) and ports (many major ports are publicly built and owned.) Transportation is crucial to markets, and if government is crucial to transportation, then what does that say about markets ability to stand on their own?

Now onto Reason Number Two: . . .