Can we not dispense with this term? Its use, common to enthusiasts and detractors alike, suggests that there is something ''out there,'' independent of ourselves, which we may either accept or heroically defy.

The reality, of course, is that ''market forces'' are the product of our own actions: you, me, and the dustman, getting and spending each day. To speak, therefore, of the ''magic of the marketplace'' or the ''invisible hand'' lends excessive mystery to what are in reality two very mundane principles underlying a liberal economic order: consumer choice, and the price system.

The only claim that need be made is this: that a properly functioning price system based on consumer choice directs resources toward where they are wanted and away from where they are not wanted less inefficiently than a system which ignores consumer choice. This hardly inspires incantations of worship, nor should it.

What is particularly galling is that because of the ''market forces'' tag the Macdonald Commission should be dismissed in some quarters as an apologist for business. To be pro-market has nothing to do with being pro-business.

Indeed, if there is any group which should be calling for liberalized markets, and is not, it is the self-appointed spokesmen of the disadvantaged in our society. They have served their assumed clientele poorly, for they have confused acceptance of the price system with surrender to ''market forces.''

There is plenty of room for an active social policy in our economy. All an economist might ask is that such policy seek to redistribute market results, rather than distort market processes. This is not just on grounds of efficiency, but of equity; the presumed tradeoff between the two is often illusory. Unemployment is as inefficient as it is inequitable, and many policies designed to promote social justice are as inequitable as they are inefficient. Three simple examples: - MINIMUM WAGE. Let us not mince words. The minimum wage is, fundamentally, an attack on those with the weakest earning potential - the young, the unskilled, minorities, the elderly, the disabled. It takes away their ability to undercut the market. It protects the haves, those with higher-paying jobs, at the expense of the have-nots - the unemployed.

Innumerable studies have shown the effects on employment of pegging wages above equilibrium - not just at the minimum-wage level, but throughout the wage structure. As the Macdonald Commission rightly points out, unemployment today is at base a question of malfunctioning labor markets, of the failure of relative wages in different sectors of the economy to equate supply and demand.

Who leads the fight against the state enforcement of unemployment? Economists have tried, including a report last year by the Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development. But no one, least of all unions or welfare groups, gives proper representation to the unemployed. - RENT CONTROL. This perennial blooms now and again in the press. Standard journalistic practice is to get ''both sides,'' so a landlords' association spokesman is interviewed, and a tenants' rights group leader replies, and this is supposed to give a view of the complexities of the issue.

Now who in his right mind would choose a landlord over a tenant? When the issue is presented in this way, not as a question for dispassionate analysis, but as a contest in rights, the outcome can be in no doubt. Though rent controls are perhaps the most discredited instrument of social policy extant, they continue in some form in most Canadian provinces.

But whose interests do the tenants' rights groups represent? Those who already have apartments - two thirds of whom, a recent study has shown, are middle- income or better - or those who would like to rent, but cannot find an apartment? The tenants in well-maintained apartments now, or those condemned to live in ever-declining conditions in the future?

The effect of setting rents below market-clearing levels is to discriminate against the homeless. It is to deliberately create a housing shortage. It's not the landlords we should be concerned about - they manage to cut their losses, either by converting rental units into condominiums, or, as low-income tenants in New York, London, Rome, and other cities have discovered, by letting properties fall into disrepair.

Who speaks for the homeless? Who speaks for low-income tenants? At present, no one, though many may claim to. - EQUAL PAY FOR WORK OF EQUAL VALUE. Least important in the equal pay debate are the usual arguments against it: the bureaucracy, the burden on business. What is important is the effect it could have on employment prospects for women, and most especially for low-income, low-skilled women.

Equal pay for work of equal value is based on a mistaken notion of what a wage is. A wage is not, and never has been, an indication of worth. Its sole function is to clear labor markets.

Wages, like prices, are information-transfer devices. Properly functioning, the information they contain is the distillation of a myriad of contradictory and complementary signals on the relative states of demand and supply in markets throughout the economy.

To reduce such a highly-sophisticated instrument for the co-ordination of labor markets into, typically, four simple rules of thumb - responsibility, skill, physical demands, and working conditions, perhaps - is to turn a Stradivarius into a fiddle, and to invite serious misallocation of labor.

The effect of artificially raising the relative wage of workers in any particular industry is to reduce the demand for their services, whether through the substitution of capital for labor or the transfer of resources into other industries.

For higher-income women with more adaptable skills, this may not be so terrible: they can more easily move to jobs where wages are in line with reality. But for those with little experience and low marketability, the results over time are likely to be grim.

Yet where are women's groups on the issue? Foursquare behind equal pay for work of equal value.

The point of all this is not that intervention in each of these areas is unnecessary. It is simply that there are better ways of intervening.

As Cambridge economics professor James Meade and others argue, if we think members of our society are working at indecently low wages, then let us supplement their income through the tax and benefit system - not deprive them of the opportunity to gain the job experience that can raise their earning power. If we want to ensure people can afford adequate housing, we ought to put money in the hands of tenants - not fix the price of rental units. And so forth.

The Macdonald Commission's report, with its emphasis on liberalizing the flow of resources in the economy, combined with a market-accommodating social policy, is a radical step in the right direction. Let us hope that ''market forces'' in the political process work to ensure its recommendations are not ignored.