Every economy has a role of government. If someone shoplifts it’s government that arrests them. There is no such thing as a free market that runs without the government. The question is what the government does.
In the 1980s, America decided that the role of Government isn’t to regulate and audit but instead to look the other way and then arrest blue collar criminals when inevitably the middle class falls apart because it’s not in the interest of corporate shareholders to have a middle class.
Boomers today still carry these attitudes with them and are still forming the lobbying and political power that prevents reversing the damage they caused.
You could throw someone in the middle of the ocean and then tell them it’s their “personal responsibility” to swim back. That’s what the boomer generation has done to the millennial generation.