The "marketplace of ideas" is at best an extremely strained metaphor and at worst a completely misleading one.

Arguably the key feature of the actual marketplace is completely absent in the "marketplace of ideas." The mechanism by which actual marketplaces tend(!) to reward good products is the price system.

Prices that emerge from a process of rivalrous bidding over scarce resources are aids to the mind that communicate vast amounts of information amongst large anonymous groups.

People use the prices that reflect relative scarcity to engage in profit/loss accounting, thereby rewarding producers that most efficiently allocate scarce resources.

Put aside the issue of to what extent this system is actually permitted to operate in the real world.

As described, it's nonetheless the process by which Smith's invisible hand channels the actions of self-interested individuals to promote the common good.

There is nothing *even close* to analogous to prices (or profit/loss accounting) in the "marketplace of ideas."

None of the institutional incentives that help us coordinate our plans in the actual marketplace are at play in the "marketplace of ideas."

This is part of why we have such an overabundance of terrible ideas and why the most successful entrepreneurs in the "marketplace of ideas" are often charlatans.

For example, Trump is a massive entrepreneurial failure in the actual marketplace, but in the "marketplace of ideas" he's easily the most successful entrepreneur in recent history.

There's just no real mechanism by which to punish the Trumps (and Jones, and Ickes, etc.) of the world for spreading bad ideas. Deplatforming and the like are only so effective.

Some people argue the inherent fluctuations and creative destruction of the marketplace creates the very conditions for its destruction via inevitable interventions and protectionism. I'm not sure I buy that.

But it applies very well to the "marketplace of ideas." The ideas that sell the most are often the very ideas that horribly undermine the "marketplace of ideas" by crowding out good faith, mutually beneficial discourse with deceptive, manipulative, dehumanizing rhetoric/sophistry

Sartre understood this when he said anti-Semites "devalue words and reasons" by treating discussions about the rights of Jews as "frivolous." The anti-Semite "lends himself but does not give himself" and merely projects their "intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse."

We should "never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies" because "they know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge."

Anti-semites are "amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words." In this way, anti-semites "discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors."