The free market, by its very nature, can be envisioned beforehand only in abstract terms. Its concrete details will reveal themselves only upon actual implementation. In fact, the free market is only a "system" in the most generalized sense of the word; it might be better thought of as a framework within which individuals are permitted to experiment with systems to satisfy their needs.

The impossibility of predicting the detailed features of the free market is sometimes regarded as a weakness in the case for freedom. In reality, however, the flexible, adaptable nature of the free market is one of its major comparative strengths. In contrast, centrally planned systems invariably require the repression of the values and plans of individual human beings, preventing them from responding spontaneously to unforeseeable changes in technology, culture, and the environment. This natural advantage of free-market processes, of course, cannot be grasped from a concrete-bound viewpoint: effective, objective thinking about such issues presupposes that we have learned to think properly in terms of abstract, open-ended concepts, which (as described in Section 1) are derived from our experience but not limited to the narrow particulars of that experience.