A problem with the argument of IT being such a free market right now is the pattern of labor markets. Look at the AI leaps and you have yourself a foreseeable "streamlining" that every other profession of the past has gone through. Miners, mechanics, longshoreman, factory workers, truck drivers, printers, brick layers, glass makers, textile workers, typists, computing specialists, librarians. The pattern is always the same. It's a hot and competitive market until it is captured by automation. Google announced going public with the project to automate programming yesterday! You seriously think the job that is coincidentally useful now will exist forever?

Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door.

And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.