How Free Markets Address the Disabled and Destitute

Someone on Quora asked,

How do advocates of a completely free market address those people are are unable to compete, e.g. the disabled, or destitute?

So I answered:

The free market doesn’t fix every problem in the world. Neither does any other system 

Consider the following questions: how does the non-free market address cops shooting innocent people by mistake? How about when child protective services separates parents from children for illegitimate reasons? How about when government decides that people should be arrested for carrying a plant in their pocket? How about when government decides that people of Japanese ancestry should be put in concentration camps? How about when 63,000,000 people vote for Donald Trump? I’m sure you have your own list. How is government going to address that? 

Sometimes government does “address” these problems by various means, just like the free market addresses the disabled and destitute through charity, trade, and economic growth. Yet when someone points out that this is an imperfect solution it seems like some kind of knockdown argument against free markets. Are government solutions not imperfect? Does government never exasperate these problems? Does government never inhibit markets from treating these problems? Do government solutions not come bundled with a bunch of government created problems? 

I think what happens is we compare what government should do to what the private sector will do. This is comparing an ideal version of one thing to a realistic version of another. This is not apples to apples. 

A completely free market addresses the disabled and destitute the same way government does, partially, sometimes negatively, sometimes merely theatrically, and always imperfectly.