I never said it always worked. I never once said anything about the "Free market". You gave me a specific hypothetical question and you got an answer. Because that answer is too hard to logically defeat you now have to take a cue from the bucky to create a strawman in which to thrust your sword at.The "free market" doesn't always work to produce the best possible option. Without regulations, corporations that have enough money/power/influence skew the rules in their favor regardless of the consumer and, according to an earlier post by you, they're legally required to. So without a body of authority to enforce said regulations, what's stopping enormously profitable corporations from changing the rules in their favor, thereby effectively eliminating the free market?
Government, for all its faults, is a necessary evil until human beings stop thinking only of themselves and what they can get for themselves.
Of course big powerful corporations/people have influence over the way society works, the way laws are made. Its like prohibition, I bet you think that was a law created for the intention of stopping people from drinking too much so that society could be better.
It wasn't. It was a ploy created by John Rockefeller to put Henry Ford's Ethanol fuel out of business by making it illegal.