Historically, those who legislate and wield power have not invoked it in that way.
That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strongly away from rule of law as quickly as possible.
It's a framework that gets invoked to go both ways. It's a vendor's "freedom" to not have to label, say, gmo, but then it's the vendor's "rights" to prohibit soy milk from using the label "milk".
"Freedoms" and "rights" get interchanged to rationalize the preconfigured results. The dogma is a general tool.
It was the "freedom" of agrobusiness to flood mexico with corn after NAFTA and run the local farmers out of business and then it was their "rights" to the marketplace when mexico pushed back. The farmers didn't have that same right to the marketplace, they didn't have the same freedoms, only international capital does. How convenient.
That's why the zealots always think it's the right answer - it can be reshaped like a mound of clay to justify and rationalize whatever they want.
For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
When instead it's a pipeline of people via a subway through a wealthy neighborhood like the purple line extension in Beverly hills, all of a sudden the free market gets invoked to guess what? Reach the opposite conclusion.
It's fundamentally a convenient power tool of capital. They used to use the Bible, now they use Friedrich Hayek. Skullduggery with the purest, most heavenly goals. Sure...
In practice, free markets are lawless raw power that bend the state to do their bidding like some feudal king, but now it's wearing a bowtie and a cardigan instead of a sceptre and a robe.
Same thing, different era.