People don't listen to economists, and it's not "free markets" that are being tried. You're raging against a system where market rights have been increasingly encroached upon over the last century, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.
Two major examples:
1. The rapid rise of social democracy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.
2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...