Free Market, my eye!

So I am currently taking an Economics class, it has been an interesting time to be taking this kind of a class. I am not sure what my professor believes, from his tone regarding political situations I would have pegged him for a solid liberal, but then last night he said he was a proponent of supply-side economics. Supply-side economics is based on the idea that if you make the supply cheaper businesses will thrive and wealth will increase. It is generally classified as a republican doctrine; lots of democrats will refer to it as “trickle-down” economics. So now I don’t know what the heck he thinks, maybe he is just disgusted with the both options? I am not sure what doctrine the democrat party would like to have attributed to them but it seems closer to Marxian than Keynesian, in my opinion. The “new” plan proposed by Obama is based on the concept that if you increase the flow of money to the consumers you will increase revenues, I am pretty sure I have posted my issues with this concept on prior posts. I am not really keen on a redistribution of wealth, I think it discourages innovation and businesses suffer.
Either way I have been thinking a lot about our economic situation and I think we are in a very unique situation. I think we are headed for a recession in some markets and inflation in other markets. I don’t know what the economic explanation for this type of situation is but I don’t think it can be defined with traditional macro-economic theory. Because while many markets such as banking, housing, technology are all facing reduced prices other markets such as oil, food, and energy are still seeing record high prices (even with a massive drop in oil, it is still much higher than our overall inflation).
I was thinking about this because last night we had a discussion of actions that could be taken fiscally and monetarily to “fight” recessions and inflation. A recession is caused by and creates an environment opposite to that of inflation. The proposed solutions to recession can cause inflation and vice versa.
Another point that I thought was interesting was the fiscal solutions for fighting inflation are to increase taxes and cut government spending. The idea is to remove money from the “system”; based on basic supply and demand this increases the “price” of the money. Funny thing is that both candidates want to cut spending and taxes? I am not so sure about the governments ability to cut spending, and raising taxes hasn’t ever been a really popular proposition.
Finally my real point was that the “Free Market” is often blamed for our current financial crisis. I don’t see how it is any more the free market’s fault than the fault of those “controls”. It isn’t like we ever let the market run free, we are too concerned about market failures so we create these controls, fiscal and monetary policies to try to “correct” the market. If the market fails I don’t think any educated person can fairly blame the “Free Market” since there really isn’t such a thing. I think this claim is no more than liberal propaganda trying to vie for more social systems and government intervention and a further reduced free market. I am not convinced that a truly free market would suffer from any of the traditional market failures, since it has never really been attempted.