Any time I run across some piece of writing that contains the assertions that the world, especially the United States, has been in the grips of market fundamentalism or the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism, I tend to drop everything and pen a firm response.

It’s a lie, nothing less.

Take the case of Ryan Blitstein, who has written, in the course of a review of a book in the Miller-McCune.com magazine, that “America now faces the blowback from 40 years of political dominance by right-wing market utopians, who championed extreme industry deregulation only to increase government’s size and power.”

 Blitstein blames this on the late professor Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who did, indeed, champion the free-market capitalist economic system.

But Friedman was anything but very influential in his efforts. Indeed, over the years that he argued for freedom as against government planning and direction of the economy — through the various ways that is done and advocated by believers of the wisdom and virtue of government officials — the various political groups that have governed have been less and less committed to free-market capitalism.

And Blitstein acknowledges this but then still insists that what is at fault is the free market. Never mind he himself admits no such things have existed since the New Deal at least.

Blitstein keeps talking about hypocrisy, but the only hypocrisy  he can identify occurred among politicians and champions of greater and greater scope for government involvement in the marketplace. Friedman and other supporters of the free market, such as Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan and even Alan Greenspan — who has always supported the free market but was willing to try to work with the politically more palatable mixed economy — never endorsed big government.

All the free-market advocates I have run across over my 45 years of interest in political economy have been severely critical of the provisions of the welfare state and the impossible mixture of capitalism and socialism. They have repeatedly warned about what will happen in time if this kind of public policy is continued.

Of course, there are ways to postpone the inevitable, mostly by printing money and placing the burden of the nation’s debt on yet unborn future generations (who are not here to protest and to vote their interest). But in time one simply cannot get blood out of a turnip.

Politicians, of course, keep promising they will do just that because that is how they gain office, by fooling their constituents into thinking they are magicians.

With more and more government involvement, which produces worse and worse public policies and economic consequences, the politicians and their cheerleaders simply postpone the fiasco  we are now experiencing. Sadly, most voters keep thinking these politicians can perform miracles just by wishing to do so.

People such as Blitstein are the ones mostly responsible for Americans failure to learn economic realities. But they will not fess up to this, not unless they are repeatedly called on their intellectual misconduct.

Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications, parent company of this newspaper. He will speak at 11 a.m. Monday at Portales Public Library. E-mail him at: TMachan@link.freedom.com