The great thing about "The Market" and the even greater thing about "The Global Market" is that it is beyond human agency; like the gods at the edge of written history it must be propitiated without question, its preference being not for virgins but for old hag public utilities. "There is nothing we can do" says an elected government leader, central banker or hallowed academic: "It's the market".

So what, I ask myself, is the market?

What is in it and what is outside it? Let me start with some terse statements about markets in the G7 and beyond. There is no free market in labour, armaments and soldiers. There is a free market in narcotics which is widely resented by pro-market governments. America has a semi-free market in hand-guns which shows some signs of being more severely limited; elsewhere there is no such free market. For reasons concerning the financial settlement after the Civil War, there is a strong market element in American banking but elsewhere no major bank is allowed to fail. There is no free market in agriculture; everywhere there are planning and other restrictions on construction. So the powerful take care of labour, soldiers and armaments and the rich are comfortable with their land, financial institutions and protection from real estate encroachment. (Fascinatingly, where I live in the South-East of England, farmers receiving large public subsidies want a free market in land so that they can sell it to housing developers in which they are being opposed by wealthy home owners who believe in a free market in everything but housing development.)

At the next level down there are monopolies and cartels which rule almost all of industrial production. Food retail is rapidly becoming a cartel; computer software is long past that intermediate stage. Medicine and justice are subject to the most arcane restrictive practices and are monopoly/cartel hybrids. Again, these arrangements are promoted, defended and reinforced by the rich and the powerful. Insurance is a government/cartel hybrid. Automobiles and their fuel, airlines and their landing rights, telecommunications, broadcasting, tobacco, alcohol, medication and almost all other products which are central - as opposed to vital - in our lives are nominally free market but are produced by cartels or virtual monopolies.

Our routine complaint is that markets cannot fix everything - they leave teenagers without housing; poor people without health care; pensioners without the means to live; and Los Angeles without a football team - but the truth is that they are not allowed to fix anything.

This issue has come to a head in Europe because of the relationship between major corporations and food production. We are in danger of losing those charmingly curly Leeward Island bananas because of the politically powerful producers of large, straightish bananas. We are being asked to swallow food whose generation is a mystery to us because that peerless country of freedom of information has decreed that labels need not declare the presence of genetic modification in foodstuffs, as it need not label the presence of BST in milk. We may be forced - or at least the poor amongst us whose decision is almost entirely driven by price - to endanger our health and that of our unborn children by consuming beef with growth hormones.

A gastronomically illiterate nation may soon force upon us regulations which limit how we make cheese even if a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of lysteria results in the bland product being more dangerous than the exotic. This so-called free market, staunched by the narrow rigidities of the World Trade Organisation, will make the world safe for any monopoly or cartel. A genuine market would simply require completely transparent labelling of the process as well as the product's ingredients. We could then choose our unpasteurised brie or plastic, cheese free Cheddar. We do not have a free market between processes but only a free market between goods produced by a standard process; by this device small and interesting products are squeezed out.

At the other extreme there is "de-regulation" which simply allows people and corporations to do as they wish; this, again, favours the large and unscrupulous over the small and careful. What is more, deregulation shifts all sorts of costs from producers and their consumers to society as a whole; pollution, industrial accidents and dangerous products carry high social costs. Respectful though I assuredly am of the United States Food and Drug Administration I cannot take wholly seriously a country obsessed with tobacco smoke but indifferent to gasoline fumes, guns and Great Lakes hosting chemical conflagrations. Some may laugh at the British for worrying in case GM crops destroy butterfly species but the neurosis looks healthier than indifference.

Looked at this way, it doesn't actually mean much, this market. We may think of a thousand jumbled stalls of all shapes and sizes selling everything from junk to fine art, baskets brimming with oddly shaped produce but the reality is the standardised jeans and the standardised apple, the merger, the takeover, the high wall and the security lock. Many of the key producers of goods and services are larger and less accountable than sovereign states, less accountable, even, than military dictators because, put bluntly, the assassin doesn't know who to shoot.

This may be an inevitable consequence of mass production and the need for massive capital investment, it may well be that a free market in goods and services is a phenomenon that occurs early in development before cartels mature, it may be that the most dynamic economies produce small businesses which can be eaten by gourmand bigger businesses; so why don't we say so?