Yes, there are exceptions, as with everything, but this isn't a path to be taken lightly. Your average worker who lost their job due to globalization ends up scrambling to find a job, any job, immediately, or else risk their family living on the street.

Relatively speaking, it would seem Ford was well enough off.

Born in 1863, given a pocket watch at 12 (1875), starting a company at age 40 after some years pottering about as an apprentice machinist before working on steam engines and other "advanced machines".

This is well above "having nothing" for those times - some decades earlier a pocket watch was an extremely high end highly valued prestige item - not so much so when Ford was given one at 12, but absolutely a signifier of "better than nothing"

Working on machines at that time was also a fairly prestige career path, well paid, in demand, not at all like being "just an auto mechanic" might be seen in the 1950s.

You're falling into the liberatarian trap of assuming a level of agency on the part of average people that lines up with your own. Turns out that most normal folks do not feel empowered or capable in any way of starting their own company, or we'd see a hell of a lot more of it. Regulatory capture, tax and accounting, the need to drum up sales and do marketing - these are all things that prevent normal folks from bothering at all, because the juice doesn't feel worth the squeeze.

You can't just do things. You need permission from all kinds of folks to do anything anymore. We've strung ourselves up on that for good reasons - to prevent environmental catastrophes, labour exploitation, etc - but it does also serve to make the "free market" sort of an anachronism. Free for whom? Not for you and me, and honestly I don't want to go back to buckets of white paint being sold as milk, so I'm okay with a little less freedom there.