Also, the idea that government intervention damages the "free market" implicitly relies on the idea that the market and the government are two distinct and pote

Also, the idea that government intervention damages the "free market" implicitly relies on the idea that the market and the government are two distinct and potentially antagonistic entities. Personally I'd argue that they're symbiotic at best; you generally don't get country wide markets without governments either purposefully creating them, or accidentally creating them in the process of trying to do something else.