The phrase free market is one of the more effective pieces of political language in circulation because it combines a genuinely appealing concept (freedom) with a technical term (market) in a way that sounds like a description of something real while actually functioning as a conclusion disguised as a premise. When a politician says we should let the free market decide, they are not describing a neutral process. They are advocating for a specific set of rules about who is allowed to do what, and calling those rules freedom.
All markets are structured by rules. The question is never whether there will be rules, because there always are, but whose interests those rules serve and who made them. Patent law is a rule. Bankruptcy protection is a rule. The limited liability corporation is a rule. None of these are features of nature. They are choices, made by legislatures and courts and regulators, that shape who bears risk and who captures reward. The financial industry that invokes free market principles when discussing regulation benefits enormously from a bankruptcy code that was written by people who understood the industry's interests very well.
The rhetorical move that free market language enables is this: policies that benefit large established players get framed as the natural order, while policies that might benefit workers or small competitors or the public get framed as distortions of that order. This framing allows the status quo, which is already a set of choices with winners and losers, to appear as the baseline against which any change is measured, rather than as one possible arrangement among many.
Precision matters here. You cannot honestly evaluate a policy claim if the language wrapped around it is doing work the actual analysis doesn’t support. Free market is not a description of reality. It is a preference dressed up as a fact.