I'm sorry that wasn't captured in my nutshell explanation. A pure, "free" market would not have any such distortions, at least in theory. A pure free market would also not have any government services, such as roads, landfills, or the military/police, so that would affect market prices. I would also argue that such a pure "free" market system would still not collect all the information needed to accurately determine the "cost" of a thing, as certain costs are often not naturally captured in the price without some kind of government intervention (for example, a factory dumping toxic waste into a river for free without any government environmental oversight to say that is not allowed).

So yeah, I don't think there's a pure free market system in the United States.