If you remember, the government did nothing to mitigate the 1918 pandemic and the recession right after WWI. It did sit back and let the free market sort it out. What ensued was a quivk economic recovery and the most prosperous decade in world history.

And liberal democracies don’t turn to authoritarian governments if those governments do nothing. The countries you mentioned that turned to authoritarianism weren’t mature, liberal democracies when they did so. Those peoples had lived under various forms of authoritarianism throughout most their histories.