It’s funny that you are assuming the market is free. It’s not. Never has been true free market capitalism. Inflation is determined by the Fed and their manipulation of interest rates. So network security has no business relying solely on the price of fees. It hasn’t worked given the current state of the chain either. Fees do not 'solve' the problem of bloat; they merely provide a price for the destruction of the network's long-term accessibility. If the network is 70% non-monetary data, it is not functioning as a settlement layer; it is being cannibalized by high-volume data-storage applications that ignore the true cost of permanent state bloat.