Does the market have the advantage of rewarding the hard-working and punishing the lazy? (or the able and the incapable). This naive idea is widespread, but the main author of free market ideology, F. A. Hayek vigorously rejects it. The market is there to allocate resources optimally (i.e. in such a way that they yield the highest possible profits). It is not there to reward diligence or ability. And it goes even further – if one wants the industrious and able to be better off than the lazy and incapable, one is a socialist, according to Hayek.
A true market liberal is supposed to accept the outcomes set by the market and not at all concede the question of whether it is right that this one is better off and that one is worse off. That is a fundamentally socialist and pernicious question. So he laid it out in detail, in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty.
Some might argue that Hayek is simply one very eminent philosopher and economist, and other free-marketeers see it differently. But the difference is that while most of those enthusiasts have it down to the level of simple platitudes, the Nobel Prize-winning Hayek has thought it through. To all its consequences.