With all due respect, this is obviously not true. The U.S. used to literally have slave labor. Then it had child labor, uncapped workweek lengths, no safety regulations, no minimum wage, etc. The workers who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, for example, earned the equivalent of today's $3.67/hour working 52 hours per week thanks to there being "no government fingers on the scale".

I know that libertarian types like to pretend government regulations just appeared into reality suddenly, without anything provoking them. But the reality is, most government regulations were put in place to save people from unsafe conditions that the free market exploited.