It is not the free market because they are privileged through their connections to acquire massive amount of cash in form of credit. The trillions of dollars available in funds from banks and retirement funds are managed by just handful of entities. You and me don't fly in our private jets to play golf with CEOs in Palm Beach. You and me don't have privileged access to these entities to get $10M loan in blink of an eye to buy up a local Rock Climbing gym and shut them down overnight. They CAN and they DO. They use their massive credit leverage through privileged connections to destruct any businesses they want, extract short term profits and move on. In many ways, few entities have monopolies over such credit leverage and that's absolutely not free market.

There are an enormous amount of laws governing private equity. Clearly there is a lot of government control involved in the industry. Government actions basically makes PE possible in the first place.