For a given definition, it doesn't. At least, not without vastly understating the gov's role (some might say responsibility) to step in and monopoly bust, regulate strategically important sectors of the economy, and generally try to provide human-scale stability to a system that tends to want to burn itself and polite society down more than a caffeinated toddler with an outlet, a fork, and a dream.
That's debatable. The US economy grew spectacularly in its first century, pulling scores of millions of poor people up into the middle class and beyond.
Regulation along the lines of enforcing contracts, protecting rights, and internalizing exernalities are the proper role of government.
Governments have never managed to make economies stable.
Anything's debatable. The question is whether or not what you've chosen to defend is more or less substantial than a wet fart in a hurricane.
Pre-industrial growth that was driven largely by settler colonialism does not make for a useful economic model since we're unlikely to find any new continents any time soon. To say nothing of the horrors inflicted on native populations, but I suspect that's not a group you'd be too sympathetic towards.
I would recommend you stop confusing your own willful ignorance with lack of evidence. You could take a cursory look at the wikipedia page on Australia's response to the GFC as a case study in government doing it's actual job, instead of this fantasy of auto-regulation via free market competition. You can have a bit of both and reap outsized benefits as has been the case for every great to super power sunce the dissolution of the USSR.
For a given definition, it doesn't. At least, not without vastly understating the gov's role (some might say responsibility) to step in and monopoly bust, regulate strategically important sectors of the economy, and generally try to provide human-scale stability to a system that tends to want to burn itself and polite society down more than a caffeinated toddler with an outlet, a fork, and a dream.