Liability still exists in a free market. Regulations are government's way of giving you immunity from liability laws, or not enacting them, in exchange for doing things a very specific ways. This creates moates.
And putting resources towards lowering that barrier would go significantly further than any regulation.
Regulation is by nature slow and highly susceptible to corruption or stagnation. Whereas the courts, as onerous as they may be, essentially achieve the same thing through liability but it is more dynamic, more responsive, and more likely to error correct than the former.
Don't forget the resources and money required to bring X to the limited attention of the regulators and to ensure the regulation is sufficiently up to date and not subject to capture. I would argue it is orders of magnitude more than exploring the same through liability.
Free markets are not a panacea, nor do ideal free markets ever exist anyway. Also, free markets require regulation to prevent powerful actors from making them non-free.
> the market will produce it.
Only if it's profitable. Feeding poor people, caring for the indigent, etc. isn't profitable.
To profit means that you accepted a debt instead of getting something in return for your efforts. Business seeks profit because the expectation is that it will pass the debt on to the stakeholders who will then call the debt and get something in return for their efforts.
But it is people who participate in the market. If they demand profit continually, therefore not getting anything in return, that just means they're working for free. People won't feed the poor unless they can do it for free? Methinks that's not what you meant.
Nor can regulation. But the idea is that, in seeking to avoid liability, people will avoid doing things that would foreseeably lead to such liability.
Likewise regulation is limited to preventing foreseeable issues, and is often only implemented after somebody suffers damages.
The difference is that regulations are imposed by a third party whose interests may not be aligned with those who are actually involved in the matter. This is good in circumstances where there are externalities, for example just because I'm okay with entering an agreement with a company to use my backyard to store toxic waste doesn't mean my neighbors would be very happy. But when people are making decisions that will only affect themselves, such as what wheelchair to purchase, liability really is the more sensible consumer protection.
Only if a wronged party has the resources (time, money, political capital) to pursue it.
Which is but one reason why it is deeply silly to rely on it to make a society go.