For decades, the right built itself on the idea of the private sector being some efficient mechanism that should be completely uninhibited and that the market will punish bad actors on its own through the power of customer choice. The right (at the behest of corporations) told us that the private sector is somehow more trustworthy than the government, and that the private sector is a rational construct dictated by the free market, rather than a barely held together clusterfuck run by human beings just as irrational as those in government. So we let the "free market" dictate the direction of the US, and that has led to the vapid society we see today. The free market eliminated jobs that didn't "require" college degrees, the free market made college a more important institution, the free market made teaching a low-paying, undesirable position and cultivated the ideological conformity we see in colleges and public schools today. National identity is non-existent and what little cultural identity we have left is being rewritten to be whatever corporations decide is palatable.
Whenever we hear companies go woke with products, it is always the same cucked response, "Just don't buy it! The market will respond and customers will just go somewhere else." "Just don't buy it," while good advice on the surface, generally is just a dismissal of concerns and telling people to shut up. It's not an act of defiance, it's an act of submissiveness, preferring to let the mythical "market forces" solve the problem for them, which overwhelmingly never happens. If those responsible for a failure in the market are too ideologically blind to actually understand or accept why that failure happened, then nothing will change, and those same people will move on to another company and infect all other companies with woke bullshit. By endorsing the complacency of "trusting the free market," we are just allowing the SJWs to destroy our culture, and then reshape the corpse of that culture into something that fits their ideology.
It's not a free market. Corporations lobby elected officials and shape the laws such that market factors favor them over potential competitors.
We don't give Big Sugar, Big Pharma, etc. those fancy titles for nothing. Since it runs through all verticals, including Internet infrastructure, payment processors, international banking systems, and so on, the effects are fairly dire.
I suppose you could call these bribes 'free' in the strictest sense, but not really in spirit.
I would argue that yes, it is "free" in that they are free to bribe and influence whomever they please. They are free to use the government to further their goals, when the private sector should be more of a counterbalance to the government. Whether it is not in the spirit of "the free market" is irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant that the spirit of socialism is not meant to be a tyrannical regime where the elites horde wealth and resources at the expense of the general populace (when that is what socialism always becomes). These systems born out of extreme faith ignore human nature out of convenience, which is why both systems inevitably produce similar results.
I don't have an issue with your argument because it's true; those with great capital will, inevitably, shape the markets to their advantage and break the core premise. It progresses further than socialism, I'd say, but their failings are fundamentally identical.
Now that the system is compromised, there isn't any effective way to break it other than physical protest (even violence), but borne from self-preservation, it's pretty hard for people to break inertia never mind the propaganda and misdirection enacted by the non-plebian overlords.