I suppose it comes down what you consider to be fair. In my opinion a free market is fair as long there is no government or supra-economical consortium controlling trade. Economy today is in some way binary. You win or you don't, there is not in between. To some extent it could even be called the harshest form of Darwinism. And this is the only way economy can guarantee for its self-sustainability. By forcing participants to innovate, safe money where possible and be on the bleeding edge (at least for technology related companies), economy constantly undergoes optimization. Working concepts get adapted into the next generation while failing concepts are left behind. So in this sense, a Free Market in its purest form would also be the fairest market, of course not taking any consequences into consideration here.
But, there is also the other side where millions of people get exploited to increase profits and child labor is increasing annually. While I am not going to further explain this argument, as I am sure, most of you have heard it numerous times, it after all comes down on which side you reside.
This is obviously heavily oversimplified, but these are just my two cents as I personally think that Free Markets are fair, but conditions under which people are forced to work are not fair at all. @denmarkguy
Thanks for the thoughtful answer @joeljaeschke; it seems to me that what we're really looking at here is that in theory free markets are fair, but there's so much external "noise" that comes along to make things UNfair. Somebody gets a subsidy, someone does not. As you say, working conditions can be horrible because the market tends to "meet" at the lowest possible price of a willing seller and the highest possible price of a willing buyer.
And so (which I also won't get into in detail) we come to the next question of whether a "free market with ground rules" is better than simply "a free market." When you go to a football game, you can do whatever you can think of to win... BUT the game IS controlled by a set of rules everyone is subjects. If it weren't, the winner might be whomever brought along a bazooka and blew away the opposition.
But as you rightfully say, it also depends on which side of the equation you fall: I happen to think people (when left to their own devices) are inherently deceptive, greedy, exploitative, deceptive and as likely to sabotage their opposition as to excel on their own.
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