It was 1944 when Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote "The Road to Serfdom," when the world just beginning to emerge from World War II. When Hayek stated that the only task of a government was to protect individual freedom and free competition in 1944, his remarks were overshadowed by the arguments of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. The statements Hayek made in his book were perceived as a criticism of the Stalinist and centralist economy practiced by the Soviet Union, rather than of statist capitalism. Many people, including Hayek himself, could not and still cannot comprehend that Hayek's criticisms were not only directed against socialist and statist economy but also against the statist and bureaucratic aspects of capitalism. Hayek's "The Constitution of Liberty," which was published in 1960, was the work that really completed his contribution to liberalism. The 1973 crisis resulted in the questioning of Keynesian statism, and Hayek received the Nobel Prize in 1974. It would be an incomplete reading if these two works, where Hayek developed the basic arguments of 20th century liberalism during the Cold War period, are interpreted merely as an objection to socialist statism, which does not currently exist systemically. Today, they should also be interpreted as a criticism of statist capitalism. However, American economist Milton Friedman, who supposedly follows in Hayek's footsteps and maintains economic liberalism as neo-liberalism, did not only object to the state's direct intervention in the economy like Hayek, but also to the state that regulated the economy. In his book entitled "Capitalism and Freedom," Friedman argued against the welfare state, and proposed a rapid privatization process. In Friedman's neo-liberalism, the market was an absolute and infallible mechanism that regulated itself.

Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics propounded monetarism as an absolute remedy that would cure all ills. In Friedman's world, there were no monopolies, nor were there Rudolf Hilferding's Finance Capital and nation-states that regarded the economy as a war machine. The free market envisaged by Friedman and his cronies would regulate itself as if these factors did not exist, and would become an endless balance. However, we currently see that this is not true when a crisis is ongoing. If Friedman was right in his argument, the financial crisis of 2008 would not have occurred. The privatization process and monetarism that started in the U.K. in the early 1980s would bring an ultimate balance to the world economy, which was disrupted and derailed by the welfare state and Keynesianism, and thus, an infinite neo-liberal harmony would become absolute.

Certainly, the endless neo-liberal harmony was merely for the developed countries, and there was hardly anything to be done for underdeveloped and developing countries. Just as democracy existed merely for slave owners in Ancient Greece, Walras' general equilibrium theory only applied to the developed Western countries in this world. Despite defending the shrinking of the state as much as possible by referring to Hayek's thesis in the West and defending a democracy via market "virtue," Friedman would be an adviser to former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, in other words, to the oppressive, military and fascistic state that ignored markets. Even this perfect contradiction alone shows us on what kind of a flawed understanding neo-liberalism was built.

The ideologues of this unsound understanding accuse the leaders of countries like Turkey, including President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of defending a closed and autarchical economy, although they introduce anti-monopolistic regulations to make the market mechanism more visible. In my opinion, however, the situation is quite the opposite both in theoretical and historical terms. For instance, nowadays, there is a prevailing disinformation that Erdoğan argues for a statist, closed and non-market economy. However, the reality is just the opposite. Let me explain this with an example. On his way home from Kazakhstan on Friday evening, Erdoğan made the following statement in response to a journalist's question of how a country can develop without direct foreign investment. "There is a decline in foreign direct investment inflow to Turkey. Last year and so far, it has been around $10-11 billion. We must drive up this figure and improve the investment environment further. We must provide more conveniences for investors, irrespective of whether they are domestic or foreign, and must ease bureaucratic mechanisms. Our main objective must be democracy and a visible economy, we must make markets more transparent." This is not the first time Erdoğan has made these remarks and he has made many similar speeches and statements.

Despite all this, why is there a distortion

of reality presenting Erdoğan as if he defends a non-market economy, and why is there a totally wrong perception of his remarks and acts especially after 2008? There is a simple answer to this: Those who accuse Erdoğan are actually the ones who advocate a distorted order where the market fails to operate fairly, and which is dominated by monopolies, or rather by a monopolistic state capitalism. This is a Friedmanian double standard, which argues for the shrinking and democratization of the state for markets in the U.S., while deeming a bloody capitalism proper for Chile.

Therefore, it is useful to summarize and reiterate one more time: What I propose both for Turkey and the wider region, from Romania to Kazakhstan, is an open economy that can compete in a global sense with a robust and recognizable financial market, and one that enables global investments to be evaluated at the highest level, since this is a true market economy.