Well that's the free market for you. No or little regulation, we've declared that corporations are people and that funding and rigging elections with the money your corporation made is constitutional, so there you go. The rich will use the money to impose their interests on everyone else.
How the hell you can describe a corporatocracy as "free market" is beyond me. I mean, it's literally diametrically opposite to the definition of a "free market".
You yourself point out that "we've declared that corporations are people". Just who do you imagine "we" is? The invisible hand of the market? No. "We" is the government, of course.
Free market =
laissez faire. Government intervening in the market (or being a part of the market) ≠ lassez faire. Government establishing the privilege of limited liability corporations, much less declaring that those corporations are people = government involving itself in the market = not
laissez faire. Therefore, government declaring corporations as people = not free market. QED.
This is why I am certain that Milton Friedman would be in hell, were there such a place. The persistent conflation of "free market" with "the opposite of a free market" is wholly his doing, and is a criminal & repugnant legacy.
ETA:
There are folks who will say that limited liability corporations
could arise out of voluntary exchange, and therefore they
would, and therefore it's not intervention to force potential victims
en masse to not seek full restitution from the actual owners of a corporation which is liable to them. I say, well, it's been argued that slavery "could" arise out of voluntary exchange. Therefore (by the above logic), it
will arise, and we might as well force it on everyone, amirite?
And all that's forgetting the obvious nasty effects of standardizing limited liability, which has the effect of routinely separating risk from the decision-making process. In short, it inevitably results in decision-makers having no personal risk outside criminal liability (and outright criminal actions are rarely necessary to lead to the sort of liability a corporation might incur) and the value of stock shares.