That’s part of the issue with free markets. There’s a missing part to the term that most people drop for some reason, and that would be ‘competition’. Competition doesn’t last very long before there are winners and losers. When it comes to the economy, that means the winner is the largest company and the losers are the companies that were bought or shut down. The end game of free market competition is monopoly. The only reason the competition doesn’t end is because of government regulation to facilitate and uphold capitalist free markets.