Today’s Washington Post has a story on economic espionage by Chinese interests, most of which have connections to the Chinese government and military. Inexplicably, the headline of the story is “Even Spies Embrace China’s Free Market.”

Government-sponsored economic espionage has little to do with free markets. These are crimes (or at least civil wrongs) sponsored directly or indirectly by over-large governments. Crime and over-large governments are antithetical to free markets, not a part of them.

Evidently, there’s some kind of market failure at the Post. (Note to the economic illiterates at the Post: That’s a joke.)