Is it a mismatch for conservatives with traditional values to believe in the free market?
It's a common idea that liberal economics destroys what conservatives love, and therefore the social conservatives who mix and match like this are hypocrites, or idiots, or just trying to protect their status. Many conservatives make this argument.
Here are the three main reasons why I think it makes sense that otherwise conservative people hold liberal economic views.
Pragmatism. The most deeply engrained part of conservatism is seeng the world as it is, not as it ought to be, and therefore acting pragmatically not ideologically. This is why Margaret Thatcher's famous slogan was TINA (There is no alternative). It's why many free market Tories are EU sceptics. The best summary of this comes from Lord Salisbury, when he was Viscount Cranborne: "if we are to deliver the jobs and prosperity we all want, we have no alternative but to build on the economic transformation we have begun to bring about in this country since 1979. Economic change that embraces free trade and the economics of the market is not change driven by ideology, but by necessity and by opportunity."
Realism. This is what underpins pragmatism. And it is summed up by another Lord Salisbury (the PM) who said that acting against the laws of supply and demand was like trying to ignore the laws of the weather. The market is not something you invent, it is something that exists.
Tradition. Jonah Goldberg talks about conservatism as a national movement, not an international one. The things conservatives wants to preserve in the UK are different than in France or America. Whereas liberals and socialists in those countries have very similar agendas. This mindset contrast is useful, because it shows us that the liberal critique of conservatives embracing the free market is made on liberal terms, not conservative ones. There is no unified global conservative ideology, so there can be very little in the way of contradiction in any constituent set of conservative views. In the UK, free market economics is part of a long political heritage. It goes back to the Saxons and gets it's fullest expression in 1688 and the industrial revolution. Yes it might be half myth, yes it might be a liberal tradition not a tory one, but this is why Nigel Lawson and others talked about the Thatcher resolution as reactionary. They were going back to the way things used to be.
Next time you wonder why someone who wants to take us all back to 1911 believes in laissez-faire economics, remember that that was (somewhat) the system back then and that it does work reasonably well. The chances they believe in the market in order to prop-up the class system seem much slimmer to me. After all, Thatcher made a lot of people from every walk of life very rich.