They're not. "Free market" is an unstable phenomenon that exists only when dynamically stabilized by appropriate regulations. Without that, it collapses on itself.

I honestly can't tell if you're serious.

Modern markets are obviously legal abstractions.

Even the labor market is held up with elaborate legal structures; e.g.,

1. stopping me from squatting in my employer's office while I start a new company or

2. copying my employer's codebase, or

3. exfiltrating my employer's customer and pricing lists, or

4. holding two jobs at competing companies at the same time, or

5. shorting my employer's stock then actively sabotaging the company.

Labor markets can't exist without lots of strong legal guardrails, and in the case of tech those property rights and contractual obligations are highly fictional and unnatural. Nothing like early civilized man bartering at the bazaar.

The amount of propaganda/brainwashing required to believe that something like a modern equity or labor market is a naturally occurring phenomenon... oof.

I'm absolutely serious. Try to take the things you know about the free markets, supply and demand, etc. and simulate them in your head. Like, run them in a game loop for a couple steps. It should become apparent that the ideal free market is not even an equilibrium state.

You do know that "free market" does not, and never has, equated "anything goes", right? There are things like regulators, laws and such.