It’s over; we’ve won. You can sell off your collection of Milton Friedman hardbacks, tape over your Stossel videos, and stop wasting your time reading rants like this one. You see, the world is now in the iron grip of a quasi-religious cult, a fanatical cabal with global influence, which has brought about a laissez-faire rapture. The world entire is now one big, totally unfettered market.

That, anyway, is what you might think to read the work of a group of anti-market pop intellectuals who are sorely vexed that they no longer enjoy the unquestioned dominance of their intellectual forebears. One very clear theme has run throughout their works since the mid 90s: faith in the superiority of markets to government intervention is something like a religion, and baby, it’s bigger than Scientology, Freemasonry, and Christianity combined.

Professional corporate-greed-basher Kevin Phillips describes laissez faire proponents as “worshipping” markets in a recent article called “Market Extremists Amok.” In September, the economics editor of the UKâ??s Guardian denounced “a messianic faith in unfettered markets, with laissez-faire evangelists insisting that governments should privatise and liberalise.” “It is market fundamentalism,” said übercapitaist George Soros in 1998, “that has rendered the global capitalist system unsound and unsustainable.” Baffler editor Thomas Frank thought the “fundamentalist” ad-hominem so very clever that he titled his anticapitalist polemic One Market Under God. The term “market fundamentalism” caught on like wildfire, and was picked up by economist Joseph Stiglitz, who says in his new book, Globalization and Its Discontents, that the IMFâ??s main problem is that it is slave to “an ideology — market fundamentalism — that required little, if any, consideration of a country’s particular circumstances and immediate problems.” Now, if youâ??re enough of a “market fundamentalist” to be reading this column, and enough of a wonk to be familiar with IMF policy, you should stop reading and get a glass of water. I wouldn’t want you to choke to death in a fit of hysterical laughter.

This is hardly a new slur; The Dead Kennedys parodied the pro-market view on their 1985 album Frankenchrist where frontman Jello Biafra sings: “Death squads / Starvation / Foreign aid? / Just leave it to the magic of the marketplace.” So, what gives? Why have these two ideas — that market liberalism is utterly dominant (rather than merely having enjoyed a fast-fading surge in popularity), and that it’s something like a religion — become so prevalent?

It is no coincidence that these ideas surfaced together, and like most effective lies, they each contain a small element of truth. The failure of Keynesianism in the 70s spurred a free-market revival in academia, above all through the Chicago School of economics. It was not until the tech-boom of the 90s, when the Internet and the associated open source movement gave many people a firsthand look at how effectively unregulated spontaneous orders could work, that laissez faire ideas became current in the popular culture. Soon, mainstream magazines like Wired were getting not just policy wonks, but also techies and college students, excited about the possibilites of entrepreneurship freed from stifling bureaucracies.

Market bashers were largely caught by surprise. Many of them, bless their earnest little hearts, were quite innocent of economic theory, and so this new confidence in markets seemed mystifying to them. “These people think markets can steer themselves without the guidance of a helpful nanny state?” they wondered. Like cavemen hearing about television sets, they could only assume that this was some sort of sorcery. How else would you get the little men inside the box? They might understand the claim that in some particular sector, markets required no intervention — though they’d be skeptical — but the notion that, on general principle, complex systems ran themselves just fine without benign intervention seemed like it could only be the product of a quasi-religious faith.

Of course, this gets things almost precisely backwards. It is the idea that all order must be explained by a functioning mind at the helm, not its denial, that has the closet affinity to the religious instinct. The same idea explains the curious notion that free-market ideologues must wield tremendous influence. If many countries were, slowly but surely, liberalizing and privatizing, it must be the work of powerful people deeply committed to liberalization and privatization. They failed to notice that many market reforms were being carried out, not by Thatcher-clones, but grudgingly, by leaders who fought them tooth and nail. Here, again, the change was the result of an evolutionary process: natural selection was finally taking its toll on constricted, inefficient, command-and-control economies. People were demanding change, and as a few nations began to wise up, others hurried to emulate them, lest they be left in the dust.

This explanation is not totally satisfying, however. It may apply for someone like Frank, but folks like Stiglitz and American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner are too economically sophisticated to really believe what they write: that free-market advocates are just zealots without an argument. They, one suspects, just realized that this line would go over well with their less sophisticated readers. It seems to have worked. This effective rhetorical tactic allows somone like Kuttner to paint himself as the pragmatic voice of reason facing down foaming-at-the-mouth ideologues. Yet, when you read his columns, you find that despite his reasonable-sounding insistence that each sector be evaluated on a case by case basis, there’s always grounds for intervention, and the government can always be trusted to find the optimal outcome that markets don’t quite muster. Who’s supposed to be working on blind faith, again?

Here, though, is that kernel of truth. If you are a good, reasonable empiricist, you will always find what seems like a reason to intervene, to make a “tiny correction” in each individual case. That’s because, as Hayek realized long ago, the real case for freedom lies in the fact that we don’t know how it will be used. Freedom will always be eroded if we allow ourselves to “correct” piece by piece; so Hayek saw the value of a, yes, “dogmatic” adherence to a principle of open markets.

After the fact, it’s easy to see how one could have reached the same outcome just a bit more efficiently through judicious application of state power. But how can Kuttner, Stiglitz, and their fellow travelers expect the same 20/20 vision when meddling in a dynamic system as they have retrospectively? Perhaps the government can consult a burning bush.