The free market is alive and well; the main thing to realize is that the free market's fence lines now encircle the globe.  When I started in business 25 years ago, it was easy to conduct business in your local community and only deal with competitors that had a physical presence.  If you were in the office supply business 25 years ago you only had to worry about another office supply company in your town.

Today, the ability to conduct marketing, sales, and customer service remotely is unprecedented.  The result of this is that your next deal may mean your competition is coming out of the Pacific rim, or eastern Europe.  It doesn't matter where you live in the good 'ole USA today, you cannot be looking across your street for competition, you have to constantly be monitoring who has an electronic presence globally.

A sub-title to this whole discussion involves the "who" or "what" your competition is.  Competition is not always a legal company.  Take the world of open source, your competition maybe a loosely banded group of individuals that develop the product, sales and support channel to compete with you.  As an American, it is time we (all Americans) get our heads up and start looking down the field (sorry for the football analogy) and seeing where our competition is on the global field of play.