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There is a lot of confusion about the term "free market economics." It is not a matter of advocacy, but a description of what's studied. Just like labor economics is not a matter of standing up for working class interests, but a study of how labor markets work. So free market
economics is a study of how free markets (would) work. It is a positive theoretical study, not ideology. So, for instance, Austrian economics is free market economics in this very positive sense, and for good reason: in order to understand how an economy (specifically, markets)
functions, one must first establish which processes are innate to markets and how they work. Only after this has been established can one introduce (theoretically) exogenous influences such as institutions (including but not exclusively interventionism). Whoever starts with the
present economy as-is finds himself in a problematic situation, because it is impossible to then separate what effects, outcomes, and orders are due to markets per se and which are due to other influences. Markets (actually, economies) are inherently endogenous (causes are human
action, which are influenced by the effects). This is also why a study of markets and economies cannot be studied inductively, because the result is just one big blob of interrelated data points. Economists have understood this for centuries, which is why economics proper has
always been primarily a study of theory. To put it differently, there are no pure market economies in the world that one can study empirically to establish economic regularities to then apply on mixed and control economies. In this sense, ALL economic theories must to some sense
be free market economics: in order to study how economies work, what the effects of added or removed influences will be, etc. one must first understand the pure mechanisms of what 19th century scholars called the "economic organism" (the economic aspect of society). (One can
perhaps criticize economics on the ground that there are no pure economic mechanisms, that there is no economic aspect to human behavior. But experience (my own as well as economics' more than quarter-millennium-old) shows that such critiques are predominantly ideological and not
theoretical.) The fact that economics proper is "free market" in the positive sense is no stranger than natural sciences using controlled experiments to separate true causes. It's just that economics is more difficult, because there is no way of constructing such experiments to
capture the true workings of a complete economy, including the profit-and-loss system, real entrepreneurship, accumulation of capital etc. To criticize economics proper, one must do better than to use one's own ideological biases to create misinterpretation of theory as ideology.
