A free market is a set of economic arrangements in which all exchanges of goods and services are voluntary. The concept of exchange, in turn, presumes some sort of shared views on the matter of how to go about determining who, in particular, rightfully controls and benefits from which particular resources – in other words, what is properly whose, hence the word property.

A free market economy is widely thought of as capitalism, but early individualist anarchists considered a hypothetical completely free market economy to be libertarian socialism, with the difference being rather negligible in context to the time periods and the nature of rhetoric used during either era of thought. Regardless of how characterized with regard to the terms “capitalism” or “libertarian socialism”, the standard of voluntarism in all exchanges would, if fully applied, demonstrably result in a stateless society – commonly referred to as anarchy.