Markets are perfectly capable of rewarding bad actors for a very long time. even if they eventually converge towards reality it's not something that you should

Markets are perfectly capable of rewarding bad actors for a very long time. even if they eventually converge towards reality it's not something that you should assume about a market in any given situation (for one thing, a market is only reflecting the opinions of others about a thing, not the reality of the thing. Even if you think the opinions are on average wrong you don't make money by finding the reality, but by predicting when and how the opinions will change). I think markets are an extremely useful decision tool in a lot of circumstances but they do still have many failure modes which aren't related to not being 'free enough' (especially w.r.t. regulation it can in fact make markets more efficient as opposed to less, depending on the regulation and the market).