Which means there can never be a free market since there will always be people able to bribe and manipulate in order to get their way. It doesn't matter how much oversight and transparency you have, those things can be slowly chipped away overtime and replaced with laws that favor the ultra rich at the expense of everyone else. I'd love to be wrong about that, but I've never seen an example of a country where wealth had no power to influence law.

That's not capitalism or a free market, it's corrupt governance and was never an intended 'feature'