Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School of Economics---that queer group who think that only free markets can properly set prices, so societies should be as free as possible. Rothbard was an economist, economic historian, and libertarian political philosopher. He raises a good point in an
article first published in 1979: In the 1930s, "they" thought markets failed. Not so.
"Unfortunately for the course of history, the common interpretation was dead wrong: there was very little laissez-faire capitalism in the 1920s. Indeed the opposite was true: significant parts of the economy were infused with proto–New Deal statism, a statism that plunged us into the Great Depression and prolonged this miasma for more than a decade."
The Ludwig von Mises Institute has a site worth surfing around.