Every commodity, manufactured product, infrastructure component, and service has vast and varying conditions. One could never compare a smartphone to housing, since, first and foremost, we can offshore it.

But you lead me to the point I was trying to make: markets are only free when regulated for the benefit of the consumers. If left entirely free, we have the law of the jungle. We left the jungle and improved our lives because of rules and those rules include fairness above all for the societies that have succeeded and thrived.

Having a lot of regulation and requirements for anything is also not an end in itself. It must constantly be changing and improving, both by efficiency and fairness. For many who only speak of “free markets”, this is anathema because, like Marxists believing in the pure and unalloyed virtue of ownership of property by workers, capitalists are just as prone to take an absolutist ideological view of the virtues of unfettered free markets.