The current brand of capitalism is not "free to fuck anybody", it's actually worse, it's "target the poor". Neoliberal economists specifically call for stealing from workers:
https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/the-case-for-hi...
> even in the long run, it’s really, really hard to cut nominal wages. Yet when you have very low inflation, getting relative wages right would require that a significant number of workers take wage cuts. So having a somewhat higher inflation rate would lead to lower unemployment, not just temporarily, but on a sustained basis.
Shorter: we create an economic policy to cheat workers out of the take home value of their earnings to make management easier and post favorable employment metrics for political leaders.
That "growth at all costs" policy, which, by the way is not inherently a free market policy, exists to short shrift the labor class by means of a compounding treadmill that most will fall off.