No large-scale free-market society exists in the world today. (The potential viability of a free-market society and other politico-economic systems—and the conditions under which they might survive—will be addressed in detail in Section 5.) All existing large societies exhibit some combination of peaceful action and of various forms of force. These two kinds of action generate quite different effects, and we need to distinguish carefully between them if we are to understand human interactions properly. For this reason we begin with an analysis of peaceful action, and the free market is therefore our starting point. Forcible interventions into the market will be addressed late in this section, while statist alternatives to a peaceful society will be discussed in Section 5. For ease of description, we shall refer to the free market using the present tense; the student should keep in mind, however, that our descriptions do not refer to the American system or any other large-scale society today.