"This assumes that rich people can't talk to one another."
No, it just assumes that they are (usually) individually more concerned with their individual gains or losses, than they are with class warfare. Occasional reversals here dont matter, this assumption only fails if 'class consciousness' becomes a more powerful motivational force here than individual profit, which seems, how shall we say? ludicrously unlikely.
Now in that context the Marxists seem particularly foolish (or malicious, depending) but that is an aside.
"Second, it also assumes that people are accountable for their failures, and as we have seen with at least one very wealthy family who has ties to the oil business AND ties to the national intelligence infrastructure. that's simply not true."
This is a more telling point. A free market does require a functional legal system, and that is where we are extremely weak.
"Competitive markets do not exist in nature."
Sure they do. In any situation in which there are exchanges, they are either voluntary or forced. It's really a continuum, rather than a binary choice, but it's still true - to the degree that exchanges are voluntary they produce free-market results, to the extent they are coërced they produce rather different results.
