Every free market has a lot of asterixis and contingencies to prevent exploitations and imbalances, such as the introduction of tariffs.
It's a free market if you and me living and working in the same country are competing for the same real estate. But if much wealthier foreigners from a country where the average salary is 5x higher or private equity firms can come and easily swoop up that real estate from us, it's no longer free market, it's just economic colonialism.
The problem with the current free market is that it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer, meaning it's no longer people competing with other people for assets, but piles of money competing against other international piles of money, and the bigger piles are winning.
All this just leads to the ever increasing wealth inequality.
The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory), but works very poorly at doing the same for life necessities like housing where costs keep going up as they're treated as investment vehicles not as commodities.
The Airbnb problem highlights that free markets shouldn't be applied everywhere as there's often important considerations that go beyond just making someone some money.
> The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory)
I know that's the general belief of free markets, but in reality the size of businesses counts far more than their efficiency or quality. Arguably, we don't have free markets as that would entail people having sufficient knowledge about the products/services and that just doesn't happen as the people with the most money can easily influence people (e.g. marketing, advertising, buying news services etc).
It's not really differently in any way, I'm on the same page as you.
Capitalism is mostly driven by greed to amass more wealth, and real estate is a finite form of wealth.
