Roderick Long, professor of philosophy at Auburn University and a Freeman author, has an excellent article at Cato Unbound on why libertarians are too often mistaken for defenders of corporatism.  This error is tragic not only because it is an error — no two things could differ more starkly than laissez faire and the corporate state — but also because it drives away potential libertarians who are repelled by government intervention on behalf of capital, such as the various bailouts of favored financial companies. We cannot too frequently repeat that free markets would not only be free of government regulation but also of privilege, such as guarantees and the “too big to fail” doctrine.  In the free market, profit and loss would be private, unlike today where losses are increasingly socialized (imposed on taxpayers) if the failing company is big and well-connected.Here’s a quote from the article (endnote references removed):

Defenders of the free market are often accused of being apologists for big business and shills for the corporate elite. Is this a fair charge?No and yes. Emphatically no — because corporate power and the free market are actually antithetical; genuine competition is big business’s worst nightmare. But also, in all too many cases, yes —because although liberty and plutocracy cannot coexist, simultaneous advocacy of both is all too possible….In the nineteenth century, it was far more common than it is today for libertarians to see themselves as opponents of big business. The long 20th-century alliance of libertarians with conservatives against the common enemy of state-socialism probably had much to do with reorienting libertarian thought toward the right; and the brief rapprochement between libertarians and the left during the 1960s foundered when the New Left imploded. As a result, libertarians have been ill-placed to combat left-wing and right-wing conflation of markets with privilege, because they have not been entirely free of the conflation themselves.

I highly recommend the article. (Look at the endnotes and you’ll find lots of links to Freeman articles.)