Our system is not a totally free market, we have consumer protection and antitrust regulations to avoid some of the possible negative outcomes there.
To pick one: trade secrets are not a monopoly. If you figure out the secret ingredient in Coca Cola (by legal means), you are free to use that knowledge and even publish it.
Similarly, I have my reservations about whether patents are a good idea; but I don't mind trademarks nearly as much.
Definitionally regulations are a divergence from an ideal free market. Provably, under some conditions (which don't exist in the real world) a market will converge to some definition of efficiency. Practically, no politician cares about this.
Politicians aren't trying to make the market more efficient with regulations -- good politicians are trying to protect their constituents, bad ones are mostly trying to protect their donors.