Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.
They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets."
They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist.
But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent.
See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/whithersocialism0000stig_i9j5/pa...