Imagine a professional football league with no referees. Teams play in this league for a while and realize that they can tackle illegally. They can join arms and run over any opposing players in front of them. If a team has a particularly agile or intelligent player, the opposing team just forms a circle of heavy hitters with the ball inside and walks forward. Eventually, teams realize that this also is unnecessary; they can simply have strong players injure the clever ones, after which they won't have to worry about them anymore.

In a league like this, it won't take long before the teams with the biggest and the strongest players win every game. No more thrilling speed on the field. No more graceful maneuvers. No more new clever strategies. The only thing that matters is how big you are and how well you can beat up everybody else.

Once the biggest and the strongest teams have started winning every game and fans stop showing up at the losing teams' stadiums, the winning teams realize something: since there's no referees, why not change the rules the way we want them? Eliminate passing, for example. Now the biggest and strongest teams don't have to worry about agile passers at all! The quicker, lighter teams need to agree to the rule change for a share of the winning teams' attendance, but of course things have gotten worse for them. The thugs' domination of the league is now permanent.

Sound familiar?

In a game with no rules and no referees, the biggest and the strongest players win.

Of course, this isn't just a game. This can happen with markets and governments, too. The nation that has arguably had the smallest government in the world since 1991 has been Somalia. With no recognized government, the nation has been governed by the biggest and the strongest -- that is, warlords.

Progressives don't find any of this surprising, and they should say so. We know that freedom needs the protection of just and fair laws that apply to everybody equally. We know that markets where the biggest companies are allowed to cheat the game in order to stifle competition and are not anything like "free markets". We know that nothing will grow from a market like that, that a market like that is bad not only for consumers, employees, and familes, but for innovation as well.

As usual, we should call a spade a spade. What they call a free market is really a lawless market, run by warlord monopolies. What they call small government is a lawless state where the strongest and the richest make the rules. Use the frame of lawlessness to stop them in their tracks.