> Even the biggest fan of free markets agrees government need to prevent market failures, such as natural monopolies caused by network effects.

No, the biggest fans of “free markets” do not think that, in fact, they mock both the general idea of “market failure” and the specific places where people outside their faith identify such failures:

https://mises.org/library/market-failure

https://mises.org/library/market-failure-myth

https://mises.org/library/myth-market-failure

https://mises.org/wire/healthcare-and-market-failure

https://mises.org/library/response-market-failure-drones

I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.

Central banking does not exist in a free market. Of course it will fail. Free markets are designed precisely to avoid the inevitable failure of a central authority.

> I clicked the first link, which argues that free markets are bad because central banking has failed.

You may have clicked on it, but I don’t see how you got that message from it. It argues that free markets are good, and that problems attributed to “market failure” are instead failures of other things (like central banking) that are not features of free markets. (All of the other pieces argue variations on the same thing; its plays a central role in the Mises Institute’s economic dogma.)

Thanks. I skimmed through it and saw the core ideas. I thought your original comment was sarcasm. My bad.

Peter Thiel famously argued that when monopolies arise in a free market, it's "actually a good thing".