Many who support state regulation of free markets claim that they are not against free markets, just against unregulated free markets.
Walter Williams explains that "People have always sought to use laws to accomplish what they cannot accomplish through voluntary, peaceable exchange" in the belief that if free markets do not yield their preferred outcomes, they can achieve those outcomes through law and regulation.
As Hamowy observes, many intellectuals gave Hayek's "Constitution of Liberty" a frosty reception because it challenged their belief in the importance of the welfare state and market regulation: "Intellectuals in both Europe and the United States appear to have remained wedded to the view that an extensive welfare state was necessary to insure economic stability and the public's social welfare and that any defense of free markets bordered on the crackpot, unworthy of comment."
"Hayek's concept of the rule of law is predicated on his belief that rights are neither abstract nor do they exist prior to the establishment of government. Rights, at least as they are understood in the Anglo-Saxon world, are essentially procedural and, as Burke earlier maintained, the product of the evolution of political institutions whose current constitution reflects the growth and arrangement most consistent with our understanding of the nature of a free society."
The rule of law itself would then have to be evaluated by reference to whether it upholds private property rights.
From a natural law perspective, property rights are inalienable rights neither created by nor destructible by the state.
The benefit of the free market does not lie in the power it confers on market participants but in the opportunities it creates for market participants to achieve their goals.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/law-and-state-coercion-liberating-effects-free-markets
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